It snowed heavily the other day, and the students had a good time, but who knows why the snow is white?

Everyone knows that water is colorless and transparent, and so is ice. Snow is made up of countless tiny ice crystals. Why did it turn white?

Let's look at two phenomena.

In summer, we use an ice planer to make ice cubes into frost, which makes us feel cool. However, at this time, you will see that the original colorless and transparent ice blocks have turned into frost and glistening, as if they were stained with white!

Sometimes, a colorless glass will be accidentally broken. When those glass fragments are swept into a pile, you will also see that the originally colorless and transparent glass has also become a pile of glistening things. Who dyed the glass white?

I turned over a lot of books and checked the computer, and finally I knew the truth.

Simply put, this is a trick of light play. It was the light that stained the frost and broken glass white!

Snowflakes and glass fragments turn white, which is caused by the change of lighting mode. Glass and ice can transmit light, but they are colorless only when they are flat and smooth, because the transmission of light is very smooth at that time. If it is uneven or even rough glass, the light will have irregular refraction and reflection when passing through, so it will appear white. And the thicker and thinner, the whiter the color. Frosted glass looks much whiter than ordinary glass; Snowflakes are also small ice crystals with many edges and corners, so they are naturally white.

Through this incident, I found that science is around us. Let's observe carefully and discover more secrets.