why purple is on the end of the rainbow/color spectrum

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

The light given off by the sun is a mix of a wide range of frequencies, but it most intensely peaks in the visible range of light we can see. This means that sunlight is a mix of ALL the colors of light, or white. Most colors you see around you are a mix of frequencies. Like if an object reflects frequencies of red and green light, you will perceive it as yellow. However, if you were to have a light source which emits photons ONLY of a SINGLE frequency, like in lasers, that light would be a ‘spectral color’.

Spectral colors are what sunlight splits into when passing through a glass prism, or through raindrops. This is because each frequency of light gets bent at a different angle due to its energy. The spectral color of violet is the highest energy and thus shows up on the opposite end of red, which is the lowest energy. All other frequencies fall in between them, thus creating a rainbow. So you could perceive something as purple if it reflects photons in a mix of frequencies of red and of blue. But this is not a spectral color which you would see in a rainbow, but a violet laser WOULD be the spectral color.

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