Why is air colourless

There are even solids, like perspex, that are transparent. You cannot cite glass because physicists believe it to be a very viscous liquid.

The bottom line is simply the ability to affect light, and gases in general have the least effect. But air is not entirely invisible either. People say that the sky is blue, but it is not really the sky but the air. Looking through a cubic kilometer of air will not detect any color, but looking at the entire atmosphere overhead results in a very strong tint of blue. The light is affected, after all, but not in the normal way of absorption and reflection.

The blue comes from the fact that the nitrogen and oxygen in the air help to scatter blue light more than any other. Air is similar to love.

Both can only be felt. Black when polluted White in the winter morning whene there is lots of fog…. Blue n Yellow when the candle burns…… Hey all this is just crap…….. The air molecules can absorb some colors from white light, but not enough to create an effect.

What I mean is, molecules of oxygen do absorb some specific wavelengths as the electrons in oxygen jump up and down, but these missing wavelegths are too narrow to make an effect.

Another example: Even though Neon gives off and absorbs red light, the pure gas is clear because the aborption of red is too specific to matter. Air, like water and glass, is visible but nearly transparent in thin layers.

Thicker layer become easily visible. At the atmospheric pressure, air is not compact enough to be visible. If it were visible it would be white because the particles in the air absorb light from all of the wavelengths of visible light, all the colours human eyes can see, and so all colours are equally absorbed and as in an inverted rainbow all colours will penetrate the atmosphere all the way down to us on the surface as the all-in-one-colour white.

Birds , who are dinosaurs, generally have 4 types of cones, whereas humans generally have 3. They can see ultraviolet. Most of the molecules in air are too small, less than nm, to reflect visible light, nm. Air is only invisible to observers like humans who have this narrow spectrum of vision.

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A second way, which accounts for most nitrogen fixation, is when symbiotic bacteria having the nitrogenase enzyme combine gaseous nitrogen with hydrogen to produce ammonia NH 3 which, in turn, is further converted by the bacteria into organic compounds.

Some nitrogen-fixing bacteria, such as Rhizobium , live in the root nodules of legumes plants and work to produce ammonia in exchange for carbohydrates. A third way to fix nitrogen is by an industrial process see Ammonia production which uses high pressure and temperature as well as a catalyst to combine atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen to form ammonia which can be used directly as fertilizer or processed further to yield urea NH 2 2 CO and ammonium nitrate NH 4 NO 3 fertilizers.

This industrial process enables humans to grow more food than would otherwise be the case, but there is concern that this activity is disturbing the natural cycling of nitrogen. The atmospheric nitrogen fixed by natural and man-made activities circulates through the atmosphere, down into the soil of the Earth's crust as well as into the lakes, streams, reservoirs, and oceans of the Earth from which it is eventually returned to the atmosphere.

There is speculation that these different cycles may be related to each other, and may influence each other in ways yet unknown; scientists continue to explore how these cycles affect each other. Air From Citizendium. Jump to: navigation , search. Main Article Discussion Related Articles [? This article is about Air. For other uses of the term Air , please see Air disambiguation. Pal Air Pollution Meteorology and Dispersion , 1st Edition. Oxford University Press.

ISBN Mesoscale Modeling , 3rd Edition. Academic Press. Fundamentals of Stack Gas Dispersion , 4th Edition. From a page on the website of "Science Made Simple".