When I was a little kid I always asked a lot of questions, mostly of my parents. Answers were few and far between, and I eventually got the hint that they didn't think my questions were serious. They also might have been too hard to answer. But these are the days of the internet, when there are answers to every question, and some of them actually right. For example, now I'm thinking up a random question: "Do fish have allergies?" To my surprise others have been wondering this, and apparently fish can be allergic to soy, wheat, processed foods and bloodworms. This might not be correct, but in the internet age do we really care?
So when I was a little kid my favorite question was "Why is the Sky Blue?" No one ever answered that question, and so I had to go the next 30 years or so wondering. I believe a college teacher once said it had to do with light refracting off dust particles in the atmosphere, whatever that means. However, the amazing internet told me it was "Rayleigh scattering", which is defined like this:
"The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As light moves
through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through.
Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air. However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas
molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. It
gets scattered all around the sky. Whichever direction you look, some of this
scattered blue light reaches you. Since you see the blue light from everywhere
overhead, the sky looks blue (http://www.sciencemadesimple.com).
So, when I had to come up with a name to write a blog under, using Rayleigh Scattering seemed to both keep a bit of anonymity, and for me it expresses the idea that I want to both seek the answer to questions and provide the answer whenever I can. There is a curiosity I had as a kid that was sincere and much of that stayed with me. I see the same thing in my child now. I wish I had a recorder when he talks to me sometimes. I can't believe such a young boy can think the thoughts he thinks because in many ways they seem more profound than those of adults I know.
When creating this blog I called it "Looking for Manolin", and this was a reference to the young character in the book "The Old Man and the Sea", which was probably my favorite book read in my youth. For some reason the story always stayed with me. The old man was somewhat of a mentor to Manolin, who came to care deeply for the old man. Some of their experiences together were an image of what I want to have with my son. "Looking for Manolin" was a way of saying looking for someone to mentor, or looking for someone who would appreciate what I have to offer. Someone who I live on through long after I'm gone.
This is also my son for me. I'm looking for him, though he's here. I'm looking for someone who wants to be with me and learn from me. Someone who will ask me why the sky is blue, and I will answer. In a non-religious sense, someone like that is, just as Manolin was for the old man, a kind of salvation. Our life is resurrected in another. Which is also interesting to me because Manolin is a spanish word that comes from the word Emmanuel, which means Messiah, or Christ.
It's hard to live up to names like these when you consider the thought I put into them, but it helps when no one knows what the names mean. I guess I thought that if a blog is going to be worthwhile then it needs to have some significance. It's very easy to fall short of that, whether in what I write or in the absence of writing, but that's o.k., because me writing regularly was always going to be an uphill battle. I don't like failure, but if I was afraid of it I wouldn't have started this in the first place.
