“This cannot be natural!”
I think examining alternative optics is not the correct interpretation here. Yes, I accept the premise of the discussion as “God made rainbows appear for the first time”, but the conditions required for a rainbow aren’t limited to “have optics like today”, and other conditions are much more manageable for God to fiddle with.
God simply changed weather a bit, so that it would no longer be completely overcast anywhere with rain. Much easier. Probably before the flood clouds held on to the rain until squeezed by other clouds from all sides. Makes sense really. ;)
So you’re saying no rainbows appeared on Earth if no sunlight shone thru the clouds? You are aware that sunlight isn’t a necessary condition for white light to be split into colors?
That is true, but a full cloud cover would prevent rainbows from sunlight. Moon bows are rather dim for unaided eyes, and would also not occur under full cloud cover. What other light sources were you thinking of?
Now you could still have “rainbows” in the spray of a waterfall and similar, but I think those are sufficiently distinguishable for God’s grand gesture to remain worthy of the occasion.
You don’t need full cloud cover for a rainbow. I’ve seen plenty of rainbows when the skies were mostly clear – all you need are plenty of droplets of water in the sky and direct sunlight with the sun pretty low in the sky (otherwise the “rainbow” is hidden by the horizon)
Only if you are wearing your god glasses.
That’s easy, before the 1930s everything was in black and white. So no rainbows.
So would the sky be blue pre-rainbow-era? I’d guess no, since light scattering would have worked differently.
It depends on how it worked. Using several of the ways I proposed above you would have Rayleigh scattering without a rainbow.
Maybe God was just making it too easy, with a sign everybody could see right off.
Maybe he should have said “Lo! I leave this as a sign for you in the heavens, that from now on sunlight will be polarized at 90 degrees from the sun. Look for Haidinger’s brush in the sky as a sign of my pledge.”
Only He’d probably call it Noah’s brush, since Haidinger hadn’t even been born.
Rainbows are not caused by light (Rayleigh) scattering, so I’m not sure why you assume this.
Do you mean glasses that makes rainbows and “spraybows” look differently, or glasses from god, or glasses for god?
“God glasses” are what true believers use to filter science and logic through primitive, ignorant cultures rigidly encoded in a holy book that cannot be questioned and is never wrong.
Actually, you’ll find rainbows treated as a case of scattering in several optics books. But it certainly isn’t Rayleigh scattering, as you observe.
Ah, I thought that might be it. I just couldn’t see how it was relevant for a silly thread where non-religious people muse on the potential consequences of nonsense hypotheticals.
A silly thread, okay; but how does that compare with religious people who spend their entire lives musing on the potential consequences of nonsense hypotheticals?
They’re a bit sad of course, but I don’t let that ruin my fun.
Why do I keep thinking this thread’s about LGBTQ life before Stonewall?
Before the rainbow, pots of gold were just lying around everywhere.