Colours Of The Rainbow

How to remember the colours of the rainbow

But how many divisions should there be…? Or so those of us in Western Cultures have always been told. Now, Pythagoras loved numbers. And he loved applying numbers to real-world phenomena. He further saw it as the sum of the spiritual 3 and the material 4.

Pythagoras also started a school, and the ideas he espoused grew into a philosophy called Pythagoreanism , based on mathematics and mysticism. And thus we now have seven days of the week, seven liberal arts subjects, seven deadly sins, seven wonders of the world and seven dwarves. This theory was in turn used by Copernicus, who is widely credited with developing the heliocentric theory of planetary motion. Math, music, numerology and a couple of dead guys.

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That, kids, is why there are seven colors in the rainbow. The more color you add, the darker you get. When you mix all three colors you hypothetically get black, which is all light subtracted. And if you mix all of the colors or wavelengths of light, they add up to white.

If you want to know more, Wikipedia has a pretty sweet table of important spectral colors and their wavelengths. Designers, check out these contests so you can start building your career. Awesome rainbow hairstyling courtesy of Azael Carrera. But in every case two elements were essential for that characteristic burst of colour - water vapour or droplets and sunlight. Finally, Isaac Newton proved that white light is made up of a spectrum of colours by splitting light with a prism. His discovery, together with the work of others before him, finally explained how rainbows form.

He also noted that the sequence of the colours of a rainbow never changed, always running in the same order - He coined the idea that there are seven colours in a spectrum: The idea that there are seven colours in the rainbow still lasts to this day, and at a quick glance you might think this to be true, but closer inspection of a rainbow shows that there are far more than just seven individual hues.

A rainbow is not a pure spectrum. It is actually made up of a myriad of individual spectral colours that have overlapped and mixed as shown in this image. Red the longest wavelength at around nm through to Violet the shortest wavelength in the sequence at nm. The seven colour idea is still a popular one and is helpful for remembering the order of the most recognisable colours in a rainbow but remember that there are also a whole range of colours, so many that we cannot distinguish them all with the naked eye.

From a very early age we're taught how to remember the colours of the rainbow using what is known as a mnemonic. This is a phrase that takes the first letter of each colour and makes up a new word which, in turn, creates a phrase that's easy to remember. Rainbows are an arc-shaped spectrum of light which are created by refraction and reflection. The properties and behaviour of light, and how it interacts with droplets of water, give rise to one of nature's most colourful meteorological events - the rainbow.

Double rainbows are formed when sunlight is reflected twice within a raindrop with the violet light that reaches the observers eye coming from the higher raindrops and the red light from lower raindrops.

To be able to see a full circle rainbow you need to be able to see water droplets below your observable horizon - if you are standing on top of a tall building or looking out of an aircraft then you may have water droplets and sunlight below your observation point. A fogbow is similar in some respects to a traditional rainbow forming from sunlight interacting with water droplets contained in fog, mist or cloud rather than interacting with raindrops as it does in a classical rainbow. Not all rainbows appear during the day.

When the sun goes down a rarer version of this natural lightshow can be seen - the moonbow, also known as a lunar rainbow.

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