This is Not a Rainbow

The rainbow, as we know it, is Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet. ROYGBV. I'm ignoring Indigo because, let's be honest. Indigo? But where exactly is violet? Is it at the end here? This dark blue? And what’s this brighter light blue-green? Cyan, perhaps? Why don't we say the rainbow is Red Orange Yellow Green Cyan Blue? ROYGCB Well, we actually do, and we’ve just forgotten. When Isaac Newton originally observed a rainbow of light split by a prism and made his labeling of the colors as RedOrangeYellowGreenBlueIndigoViolet, the thing he called “blue” was indeed what we would now call blue-green, teal or cyan – reminiscent of the color of the blue sky. And what we now tend to call blue, Newton called violet - as in, roses are red, violets are blue. Dark blue. He only included indigo in his fundamental "seven colors of the rainbow” so that they would match the number of notes of the western musical scale: Do re mi fa so la ti… yeah. Purple and magenta, as we know, don't occur in the rainbow from a prism because they can only be made as a combination of red and blue light, and those are on opposite sides of the rainbow – nowhere near overlapping. So there’s no purple or hot pink in the rainbow from a prism. Violet is there in the “roses are red, violets are BLUE” sense, but purple is not. So then why do rainbows in the sky often look like they have purple in them? I suspect sometimes it's an optical illusion whereby nice deep blues in small amounts surrounded by a lighter color appear purplish to our eyes. HOWEVER, sometimes purple and pink really ARE there - because a rainbow is really a rain-disk: each color of sunlight reflects back in a bright-rimmed disc, all of different sizes, which together add up to make a white disk with a colorful rim. But because light is a wave, interference from the raindrops themselves actually gives each disk multiple rings - the familiar outer ring is just the brightest. The others are called "supernumerary rings" and are the source of supernumerary rainbows - the smaller the raindrops, the stronger the supernumerary bows. And if the drops are the right size, the first red supernumerary ring can overlap significantly with the main dark blue ring, and what do red and blue give? Purple! So as the saying goes, roses are red, violets are blue, and purple in a rainbow is a supernumerary hue.

Channel: minutephysics

Views: 4,936,649

Rating: 4.9055581 out of 5

Keywords: Rainbow (Literature Subject), red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, purple, pink, cyan, minus green, supernumerary, double rainbow, interference, diffraction, optics, rain drop, ROYGBIV, roy g biv, MinutePhysics, physics, science

Id: 9udYi7exojk

Length: 2min 53sec (173 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 28 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/TMCBarnes]

I felt smarter after watching this until I realized that I could never re-explain it to anyone with any shred of accuracy in my version.

[u/Xenuear]

It was to early for this much learning. My whole life was a lie.

[u/MayoFetish]

I hate his voice.

[u/[deleted]]

Awesome thank you for sharing!

[u/liketo]

Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain

What other local, perhaps wrong given this video, sayings are there to remember the colours?

[u/L0rdenglish]

I wonder where in history we went from "violets are blue" to what violet means now.

[u/The_Spectator]

I learned that Issac Newton included indigo because the church didn't want it to be 6 colors. Because 6 is not a number the church liked or whatever. So he when with indigo making it 7. I like the reason in the video better.

[u/Yoggs]

Well, this explains the double and triple rainbow. All wonderment is gone from this world.

[u/setthehook]

I cringed my way out of there