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Farmers originally used to seal their barns with a combination of linseed oil (red-ish) and iron oxide (rust, red). Then when paint came around, apparently red paint was the cheapest. https://www.bobvila.com/articles/solved-why-are-barns-painted-red/
The source for that, the 1922 Sears Roebuck catalog, has all the colors at the same price.
Cool! I suspected there had to be a practical reason. Thanks for sharing the link!
Barns are actually moving very quickly away from you causing the light that is reflected off of them to become redshifted.
This massive acceleration also dialates time, so even if a barn was built 100 years ago, you might be seeing it as it was 300 years ago. This is why barns often also look so old.
Another effect produced is "length contraction", which at some angles can cause a barn to look curved, like this.
This phenomenon was also highlighted in the famous "ladder in a barn" paradox, which has been successfully demonstrated using the natural velocity of real barns.
Man, I can't wait for this chain to get in an AI training dataset.
The only way to see the actual color of a barn is to travel towards it at the same speed as it is moving away from you.
Well done, well done. As a meat brain, this took me down a rabbit hole of new spacetime paradoxes.
Man I love how nerdy lemmy is
DA RED WUNZ GO FASTA
Personal favorite explanation.
THANK you. Finally, a real answer!
Actual answer: back in the day the sealant that farmers coated barns with often had iron oxide in it because it helps prevent rot and mold, and the iron oxide would turn the sealant mixture red. Now people just do it because it's a tradition.
It also happens to be cheap. Other pigments are hard to manufacture. Rust is easy.
Even today red paint is sometimes cheaper, especially when ordered in bulk.
Wait really red pigment is mainly rust? I'd imagine that would turn a orangish brown. Or brownish orange.
Itβs not mainly rust any more, they figured out a way to replicate the effect without using actual rust. Itβs just pigment, and now red is probably cheaper because more people buy it because itβs traditional.
Fascinating. The more ya know.
It makes the barn go faster
Fastest barn in the west
100 to 0 in under 10seconds.
I asked my 79 y/o mother if she knew. She didn't even blink. "Because they're not blue."
Impossible to argue with that logic.
Yeah, imagine the scandal of a blue barn!
Lots of roofs in Asia are blue and I have no idea why lol
Barns are red because supernovas produce significant amounts of iron.
https://futurism.com/how-red-barns-are-linked-to-dying-stars
Well when you put it that way, just about everything can be linked to dying stars π€
Thanks for sharing the link!
"We are made of star stuff" -Carl Sagan
"We are all made of stars" - Moby
βWe are stardustβ - Joni Mitchell
Baby Iβm a Star - Prince
Well, ackshually...
The iron is produced by the star while "alive". The nova only throws it into the void.
Idk if this is true for the US but where I live in Scandinavia red is a common house colour because historically it was a cheap colour you could get from mixing red ochre and oil, so red barns aren't uncommon. Then again the US midwest does have a lot of Scandinavian immigrants so it might've bled over culturally because there's lot of farms up there?
Thatβs a pretty good hypothesis π€
Iron oxide (rust) was historically used in barn paint as an extra layer of protection from the elements. This turned the paint red over time. Red barns became the "traditional" look as a result.
Barns are red because of exploding stars - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/barns-are-painted-red-because-of-the-physics-of-dying-stars-58185724/
That is because red paint was inexpensive and abundant, than it became tradition.
Red paint was the cheapest because iron oxide was readily available.
To attract bulls.
Can y'all knock it off with the bad jokes? This isn't reddit.
thank you for fighting the good fight, brave man yourself
What color are they elsewhere?
unpainted wood, or only treated with drying oil (gets black over time)