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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One simplistic way to think of is it to put the colours on a pie chart or around a tube, where the ends of the spectrum meet. Our eyes see both ends of the spectrum as somewhat similar. So at one end you have red, and at the other end you have almost come around to red again.
Or you could think of the spectrum as akin to musical octave. You have a “C” or whatever at the bottom and a Bb (almost C) at the top. Red has almost exactly double the wave length of violet, so red and violet may somewhat be perceived as similar by our retinal receptors, just like middle C and high C sound weirdly alike to our ears.
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