Today there was a book launching in Nelson in a children’s series entitled: Learn and Do. The book, called Let’s Plant a Flower, is aimed at small children and encourages them to go outdoors and do just that. What can I say, this is a worthy objective nicely presented.
Yet, I have a problem with it. Certainly, I am in favour of encouraging children to go outside and interact with nature. But, while the book increases a child’s sensitivity to one aspect of nature (plants), it offers the child nonsense about another (weather). To see this, you have to visit the sample pages for the book on the website for Let’s Plant a Flower, and turn a couple of pages (click on the lower right corner of a page). Presented is an impossible rainbow—one that cannot happen in the natural world.
Red is on the outside; blue is on the inside.
The drawing displays a number of unnatural features; I will mention only two.
First, the colours in the book’s illustration are presented backwards. In nature, the colour order of the (primary) rainbow is red on the outside, blue on the inside. Nature is not capricious on this point. See the picture to the right, the header for this blog, or for that matter, any rainbow picture.
The observer's shadow is the centre of the bow; the Sun is on the other side of the sky.
Second, the Sun in the book’s illustration is positioned along the bow as if it were a buckle on a belt. In reality, if you look at a rainbow, the shadow of your head is the centre of the circular bow and the Sun is at your back. The Sun and the rainbow do not appear on the same side of the sky. That is just the way nature behaves.
So what? Isn’t the book’s illustration merely an example of artistic licence? Possibly, and I often thoroughly enjoy artistic licence, examples being the works of, say, Picasso or Escher. But I wouldn’t want my surgeon to have based his knowledge of anatomy on the works of Pablo Picasso, nor would I want my building contractor to have learned construction through the works of M.C. Escher. I would like such people to be grounded in reality.
In like manner, I wouldn’t want my children to learn about nature from this book.
Hello; my neighbor sent me your website and recent “family portrait”
She knows I appreciate birds, and Kootenay lake, and art and music, as that is what I do.
But this evening I found you comments about nature, art, children and the rainbow very provocative.
Thank you for the “stir”.
Roslyn Frantz
Roslyn, as I wrote this little essay I guessed that no one would be willing to join the fray with a comment. So, thank you. After I posted it, I pondered: If I had written a physically correct instructive book about clouds for children, but one that also happened to show bizarre images of the biosphere (deer soaring high though the air as they tried to swoop down and devour a coyote; a forest of trees balanced on their crowns with roots sucking nutrients from the stratosphere), the biological community would have treated the book as a joke—no matter how good might be the meteorology. That community would have said: this book is not fit for our children.
Check out Julia’s Rainbow Corner
http://juliasrainbowcorner.com