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59 points
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You see the light reflecting from paint doesn’t actually become blue, it loses yellow

so if i put spectrophotometer, it won’t show spike at 460 nm?

well, yes, it would

fucking nerds

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This isn’t that pedantic paint shit. The tweet did a bad job of explaining

Blue Jays are blue because of structural coloration rather than pigmentation, like how peacock tails or butterfly wings work. While the actual pigmentation on a Blue Jay’s wings is brown, the light bending caused by the tiny structures within their feathers makes them blue. Pretty neat!

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35 points
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The end result is still the same, the neat interference aside, they are “really blue”. The starting point of the tweet they are not and it is nerd shit.

The neat interference can be brought up by like comparisons to: gas spills on water, butterflies, tempered steel, dslr lenses, *opals!

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Yeah bad tweet for sure, I just think structural colour is very cool.

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12 points

It’s light scattering rather than “bending”, which is not bending but rather refraction due to the differences of the speed of light within the feathers compared to outside the feathers in the air.

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44 points
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when I’m at a pedantic nerd competition and my opponent pulls out a spectrophotometer

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35 points

You came at me talking about objective facts without scientific instruments? Think better, kiddo

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24 points

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9 points

*spectrometer

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14 points

a UV-vis spectrum of the pigment in their feathers should look like this and the observed light is from scattering instead of absorption processes. god fuck please wedgie me

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12 points
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yeah, but instead feathers look like this, also known as “really blue”

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15 points

pedantic shit but since im shrivelling into a corn cob: reflectance spectroscopy on a bulk structure that reflects blue shows that it indeed reflects blue, not that the material comprising the structure itself transmits blue as with pigments

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