I think he is wrong to some degree. Use a motorized mount and track the Sun, you would expect at some point that the rate must drop rather radically in order to be one entire Sun diameter behind.

Who is the brunette??

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronni_Ancona

Someone find that man the clip of Ronni Ancona and that one Qi clip where she tells a cool story about a word.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUnBGk2nb3w

>> ^Yogi:

Someone find that man the clip of Ronni Ancona and that one Qi clip where she tells a cool story about a word.


It's even on the Sift.

Hmm. I think there would be a better way to explain it, assuming that I understood the idea properly:

Lets for a moment ignore the finite speed of light; Alan Davies was I think suggesting that might be what is being referenced here. For example, light from the sun takes about 8 minutes (8.3 roughly) to get to Earth, therefore where we see the sun in the sky is actually where the sun was 8 minutes ago. However, I don't think that is the idea here, because that would be universally true rather than happening when the sun sets in particular.

Instead I think that the idea is that the atmosphere bends the light from the sun when it is coming through at that low angle, so what we are seeing had actually been bent around and altered like a mirage. If I am getting that right, I think some better ways to explain it would include:

Shooting a bow and arrow at fish in a lake. If you aim directly at the fish and release your arrow, you will miss because the water has bent the light that you see. The atmosphere is doing the same thing to the sun's light in this case. OR

Lets assume that you had a gun which could shoot bullets at infinite speed, beyond the speed of light even. If you aimed and shot at the sun as it was setting, you would miss the sun because your bullet would fly out in a straight vector, but the sun wouldn't actually be where it appears due to the light being bent by the atmosphere.

Pretty cool, but explained in a way that wasn't quite as clear as normal QI for me.

Sometimes I think Fry seems to gloss over the explanation as though he doesn't quite understand it himself.

There's also the fact that the light is arriving 7-8 minutes late. So the correct answer would be where the sun appeared to be was 7-8 minutes before the moment where the bottom touches the horizon, I mean, if he's going to insist on being such a bloody Stephen Fry about it (is there another word?), that is.

Semantics!

He said hit your buzzer when the sun is below the horizon, not when the sun has set.

If you think, throughout time, man has decided that once the sun disappears, it has "set", then they are correct, but that's not what he asked.

Fry seems to understand it. As the light enters a more dense medium (more dense than space, our atmosphere, and even the varying degrees of density of our atmosphere) it is bent towards the normal, similar to when you look at your legs in a pool - only in that case the light is going from more to less dense and so bends away from the normal. The normal being a line exactly perpendicular to the surface (or a tangent to that surface) where the light crosses between different densities.

I'd say he understood it based on what he said.

THE SUN IS A LUDICROUS LIBERAL MYTH!

[redacted]

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