All aspects of our lives are colored by the influences of science. Many of the technologies we rely on sit on foundations of scientific principles that were based on simple questions like “Why is the sky blue?” or “Why does the sky glow so brilliantly at sunset?” Yet we take the foundations of our modern technology for granted.

Similarly, we take for granted the foundations in our homes ~ until there is a problem. Like the sensational problems a damaged foundation in our home can cause, problems with a foundational scientific principle become sensationalized in the media.

As a writer and a scientist, I believe our policies ~ the ones that affect our livelihoods and the world we leave to our children ~ often are based on the understanding of scientific foundations. We must understand how key works of science affect our lives. We need to understand these principles in simple, realistic ways, so that we can make up our own, educated minds about important matters (and, ultimately, our votes). That is the reason I will bring you this column each month: to give readers new and interesting perspectives on our shared everyday experiences and the technology on which we rely. With that in mind, I come back to those simple questions: Why is the sky blue? Why does the sky glow so brilliantly at sunset?

The simple answer to the question is the polarization of light. In the case of our blue sky, the polarization ~ which you’ve no doubt heard of from the packaging on your sunglasses or a filter-attachment for your phone’s camera lens ~ is due to the something called Rayleigh scattering. Because our atmosphere scatters more violet light than red and the human eye is much more sensitive to blue light than to red light, our daytime sky appears blue. If our eyes were more sensitive to red light, our sky would seem violet during the day.

The beautiful sunsets you see at night are due to the angle of the sun in the sky. Because the sun appears to be closer to the horizon, the light must travel through a larger slice of atmosphere. The result is the light must pass through more air, causing a larger scatting of light, which brings the color away from blue and toward red.

The construction of your sunglasses and camera filters rely on a different kind of polarization, one that is tuned to the ultraviolet light that passes through our atmosphere and is invisible to our eyes. While sunglasses are at least as old as the Roman Empire (Romans used thin pieces of bone or ivory with small horizontal slits in them), the scientific foundation of polarization plagued scientists. Finally, in the early 20th century, a scientist named Max Planck outlined a new theory of light. Planck’s theory is the foundation for modern technology, including fiber optic lines, GPS and the material science that allows us to produce strong, defect-free plastic parts.

However, we still do not fully understand the nature of light. Scientists still seek to understand why sometimes light acts as a wave and why it sometimes acts like a particle.

I find the fact that we are still learning about light to be sensational, and I hope you will continue to come back and read about the scientific foundations of our everyday lives.

By R.J. Linton