Sometimes the simplest things can give rise to the most perplexing questions and it is really fun to explore these and find answers which I must say, often end up surprising you quite a bit.

Take for example "How does wind blow" or "How do Earthquakes occur" and so on. Although many may know the answer to these questions, it might surprise you how many people actually don't.

This is why science is fun. It gives you information on how things are and how they work. You might not be able to use that information practically in your day to day life, but having that knowledge can be really satisfying, even if it is to give your brain a little workout.

One such question that one my friends @manisha.jain9 asked me recently was "Why are coulds white?". I must say, I didn't quite know the answer to this (even though I had a vague idea) and it raised my curiosity.

What's The Answer?

Well, this has to do with how light works. As we all know, the light that we get from the sun is actually white and it is itself a combination of the different colors of the rainbow with different wavelengths.

Now, when white light enters a cloud, the different colors interact with the tiny droplets of water in the cloud and are dispersed. These tiny droplets can be about the size or even bigger than the wavelengths of these different colors.

So, the dispersion of these different wavelengths happen more or less uniformly and so, we get a uniform result i.e. white light. Now, if the tiny droplets of water in the cloud were smaller than the wavelengths of light, we could see different colors, depending upon the scattering.

In fact that is why the sky is blue. The gas molecules in the atmosphere are smaller than the wavelength of light and they scatter blue light a lot more than they scatter red light which has a longer wavelength.

Isn't science really fun? :D