Why are the colours in rainbows in separate lines?
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This has a pretty interesting answer I think!
It is because of _our brains_ and _language_.
You see, colors do not actually exist. What we perceive as colors are just different wavelengths of light.
We don’t have to go into what wavelengths are, just see them as a quality light has that can differ.
Eyes evolved to see a certain spectrum of light. That means a certain slice of all wavelengths light can have, the rest is invisible to us; like radio waves or x-rays!
The human brain evolved to divide this visible light so we can make out subtle differences, most likely like seeing a tiger in the grass, this is the sensation of color.
So actually, rainbows are just a gradient of wavelengths, but we _perceive_ that as individual colors.
But the weird thing is, just _how_ individual they are perceived to be seems to be closely linked to _language_.
Some languages only have three words for all colors: red, black and white. What seems like blue to you, a native speaker of that language might say is black. What you say is purple they might say is red.
Some languages have four colors and so on.
English, not counting hues, _generally_ has 6 main colors. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, (indigo), violet. Does that ring a bell?
That’s the colors the rainbow is said to have in English (and many other languages). Isn’t it strange and kind of awesome?
The brain and how it perceives colours is an interesting thing. Take magenta for example, in reality that colour doesn’t exist but it’s our brains filling it un to make sense for us. Also the colour yellow is seen by everyone differently as our eyes only have red, blue and green rods so it takes information from the green and red cones and fills in the blanks. I’m sure I read somewhere that goldfish have yellow rods un their eyes so can truly see what the colour yellow us. Also look up about impossible colours, it’s fascinating what our brains do and how we perceive what we “see” is just the brains interpretation of data/information.
Counter question: are you sure they’re in separate lines?
It looks like a continuous gradient to my eyes, I’ve never seen “bands”.
There’s more yellow and red than others to me, but I’m pretty sure that’s largely because the middle is the most intense (you can easily see this with black and white photography) and red stands out more noticeably against the blue sky than the bluer half.
Light gets refracted every which way in a rainbow thru water droplets in the air – depending on the wavelength of light and the angle it passes thru a water droplet. But, in the center of the rainbow, refracted wavelengths or colors combine with refracted colors from other droplets to make white light again. That’s why the center of a rainbow is often brighter than the surrounding sky. The bands of colors we think of as a rainbow are just the edge where colors are refracted at angles that don’t combine with other colors.
I’ve only ever seen separate lines in artwork/recreations of rainbows. Rainbows in real life, or photos of them, look like the color gradients you see in color pickers (like in Photoshop).
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