Growing up, I was taught that rainbows have 6 colors. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. It makes sense as it goes from primary color (red) to secondary color (orange) back to primary (yellow) back to secondary (green), to primary (blue) and finally ending on secondary (purple). Indigo is a blend of blue and purple, but purple is a blend of red and blue…..
In: Physics
Believe it or not every possible wavelength of light is present in a rainbow including radio waves, xrays, microwaves, infrared radiation, and uv. You can check this pretty easily by narrowing the curtains in a window facing the sun to a crack. Place a prism in front of this beam of light. Place a thermometer to the left of the red side of the spectrum. The thermometer will increase in temperature compared to a thermometer placed in the room away from the refracted light demonstrating the presence of invisible temperature increasing infrared light or as it’s more commonly referred to infrared radiation. Indeed a decent portion of energy emitted by the sun is infrared radiation which contributes to the heating of the earth.
How many rainbows have you seen op?
Purple is not in the rainbow, it is a mix of red and blue. Since red and blue are on opposing ends of the rainbow, they cant mix.
Hence Indigo, a kinda bluish purple without any actual red in it.
But our eyes are kinda imprecise, so seeing indigo wavelengths also triggers our red cones, so it appears purpleish to a human eye.
I just remember “ROY-G-BIV” for the rainbow. 🌈
Red orange yellow green blue indigo violet
How else can you spell “Roy g biv” without indigo?! “Roygbv” makes no sense!
That’s really interesting. When I was a kid I was always taught to remember the 7 colors of the rainbow:
ROY G. BIP.
Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Purple.
Interesting… I was taught in school that indigo IS in the rainbow. Roy G. Biv. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Indigo is that tricky shade that some people would call blue, and some would call purple. The rainbow also includes colours like chartreuse, aubergine and cobalt. The “colours” of the rainbow are more like the groups of colour we can see – not an all encompassing description of colour.
Newton was a nut and thought that the number 7 was some sort of mystical, inherently magical number that everything in the universe worked around. So he jammed an extra colour in there to make it up to 7. Things like infrared and ultraviolet would be added later as we discovered them.
Newton also thought that he could mathematically calculate the biblical apocalypse and tried his hand at alchemy trying to convert metals to gold etc.
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