Explaining intagible concepts to a person who has been blind since birth

I'm going to assume that the blind person I'm explaining these to is into technical definitions and not the emotions that sunrise guy went with.

Shadow

Imagine the area under an umbrella when it rains. The ground below you remains dry in the exact shape of your umbrella because it is blocking the rain. A shadow is this same idea, but with light instead of rain. Sighted people can see the exact outline of things that have lights shone on them in some situations and we call them shadows.

Rainbow

Think about a musical scale, which goes C D E F G A B C (sing this part), hitting a set of different frequencies to cover the full spectrum of a musical scale. A rainbow is a lot like this, but for colors. Sighted people can only see light in a certain spectrum of wavelengths, and at different levels within this spectrum we see different colors in the same way that the note D sounds different and distinct from the note B on the scale because it is a different wavelength of sound. Colors have a lot more differences than the notes on a scale, but functionally, a rainbow is a set of concentric semi-circular rings in the sky with all of the colors that sighted people can perceive.

Fog

Fog is pretty much a very low hanging cloud. It's water vapor suspended in the air that is dense enough to partially block light going through it. The effect of this is that you can't see very far away from you because after a certain distance this minor blocking adds up to enough to fully block the objects behind it. Think about how well you hear in the air, compared to how well you can hear in the water. When you have your head an inch under the surface of the water you can still hear things above, but less clearly. The deeper you go, this effect keeps compounding until you can't hear anything at all above the surface.

Heat shimmer

A heat shimmer is a type of mirage where it looks like you're seeing through water where there's nothing but air. It's caused by the air close to the surface being heated by something like a hot road to be a lot hotter than the air farther up and drawn up by convection. This looks like water, because this convection effect creates a gradient of different levels of refraction in the air that also happens in water.

Think about a mosaic, where you take one thing, like a tile, break it up and then put the pieces back together, it has cracks now and isn't in the exact same spots as before. Water and heat shimmers create a similar effect on what you're looking at, but constantly shifting into different mosaics of the same picture with a blurred effect added.

Cloud

Think a huge bunch of cotton candy or cotton ball in the sky. It's a mass of water vapor whose main feature is its lack of distinct edges, and they're constantly being slowly changed by the wind around them. They're humongous, easily larger than the largest buildings, but so far away that many look like you could fit them in your hand, like a cotton ball.

Sunrise

A sunrise happens when the earth rotates to the point where the light from the sun starts to stop being blocked by the other side of the planet. When it first stops being blocked by the ground, it's still being blocked by a lot more atmosphere than it would later in the day which changes its color, makes it dimmer, and diffuses the light to cover a lot more of the sky. Eventually, after an hour or so, it's far enough past the horizon that the amount of atmosphere between the viewer and the sun is to its normal amount and it stops looking unusual.

Now, this diffusing and color changing effect creates a harmony of different colors which have a lot more depth than the simple, unbearably bright light that the sun provides the rest of the day. Musically, you could say that the sunrise is like a soft piano chord that slowly grows while the rest of the day the sun is just a single, endless loud note that you wouldn't want to put your ear right up to the speaker for.

Space girl did a good job.

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