What would be a good way to visually demonstrate the scattering that creates a blue sky?
Probably the best and easiest way is to shine a beam of light into a container of water that you’ve put a few drops of milk into. You’d want to experiment with how many drops of milk before doing this for a class. It would be best to darken the room and have a fairly sharp beam of light. The milk has tiny globules of fat that scatter blue light. The best source of information that I know of for a lot more on topics such as this is the book, Clouds in a Glass of Beer by Craig F. Bohren. It’s one of the books in our Weather library recommendations. Bohren not only uses simple experiments to illustrate many points; he has extremely good discussions of the basic science.
