First of all, I don’t understand why indigo and violet are split… why not just call it purple? Ok, not my question.
Colors of the rainbow all make sense to me except purple.
Red – orange – yellow…makes sense that orange is between red and yellow, and it’s the combination of those two primary colors, nice transition
This follows with green, blue. Green is between yellow and blue.
Now… if purple aka indigo and violet are a combination of blue and red, how can it be on the opposite end of red (very different frequency) and outside the frequency range of blue? I would expect a secondary color’s frequency to be between the two primary colors that create it
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The rainbow colors aren’t mixes. For example, the green in the rainbow isn’t an equal mix of blue and yellow photons. It’s 100% green photons.
Same with indigo. 100% indigo photons. Same with violet. 100% violet photons.
The primary color thing is more of a trick that painters use. Why bother trying to find a real green pigment, when you can fool the human eye by mixing yellow and blue. If the human eye had more sensors, you wouldn’t be able to trick it so easily.
But sunlight has photons of almost all colors in it. When they get scattered by the rain drops, each color takes a slightly different angle for physics reason, and they appear separated in the sky.
The fact that we see 7 colors is, again, a limitation of our eye. Other species see more or less colors (mostly less, we have really good eyes). In the eye of God, or an infinitely precise eye, the rainbow would appear as a continuous smudge from infrared and lower to ultraviolet, with an infinity of colours, each one photon thick.
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