All the other colors are primary colors and secondary colors. Is there a scientific reason that indigo is notable?
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So first of all there is nothing scientific about saying there’s *any* specific number of colors in the rainbow. That’s entirely cultural because the rainbow isn’t this thing with discrete changes its a big continuous smear of color with 100s of different “reds”, “blues”, “greens”, etc.
That said, in English we tend to say the rainbow has 7 colors because Isaac newton really *really* liked the number 7 and thought it had some cosmic significance so he made damn sure the rainbow would be talked about as if it has 7 colors too. He did a lot of research about how light and vision work, so people listened.
Just to drive home how cultural this is. There are languages that don’t have different words for “green” and “blue” like we do in English. And there’s languages that have entirely different words for things we might think of as the “same” color.
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