I Found a Rainbow At the End of My Hunt For a Vaccine Appointment

A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up here to receive a new edition every Sunday. CHASING RAINBOWS (AND VACCINES) We, humans, are notoriously unreliable, superstitious narrators, always scanning the horizon for signs that validate what our hearts have already told us. Take me, for example. I keep telling people I was vaccinated at Hogwarts’ Manhattan campus under the waxing moon (it was a gibbous moon to be exact). How auspicious! Ok, so my COVID-vax site was really The City College of New York. But stepping through its big old gothic gates to receive a blessing of science was wondrous, maybe a little spiritual. There was even a rainbow-y halo around that big moon, another lucky omen if you’re hungry for such things. Photograph by Susanna SchrobsdorffThe entrance to The City College of New York, Manhattan campus which is serving as a coronavirus vaccination site. I started digging for lore on moons and rainbows and learned that the physics of rainbows doesn’t detract from the mythical place they have in our cultural imaginations. In fact the opposite. There’s inherent poetry to what happens when rain and sun collide. For example, each one of the billions of droplets in a rainbow conveys a different color when the sun refracts through it. And even if two people are standing next to each other, they are looking at different rainbows comprised of a different set of droplets. (Yes, we each have our own...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Evergreen It's Not Just You Source Type: news