More than three centuries ago, Isaac Newton managed to demonstrate with the help of a prism that the white light of the Sun contains colors starting from red, in turn going through orange, yellow, through green, through blue and indigo until it reaches violet . This separation of light in the colors that make it is called the decomposition of white light.
Newton's experiment is not difficult to reproduce, since it is not necessary to have special scientific instruments to carry it out. Even today it turns out to be one of the most beautiful and instructive for beginner students of optics in basic, middle and higher education. It can be achieved with a prism, which, when traversed by a beam of white light from the sun, causes the ray of sunlight to refract and come out on the opposite side decomposed in the seven colors already mentioned.
But many centuries before Newton was born nature had already decomposed the sunlight again and again before the eyes of our ancestors. Sometimes, after a drizzle; others, a storm. The truth is that the rainbow was for a long time a phenomenon as amazing as overwhelming. Sometimes taken as a carrier of auguries, in others as the inspiration of a legend, and always as a work of art, the human being has never ceased to seem wonderful.
The complete theory of the rainbow was, however, earlier than Newton: in the Middle Ages Theodoric Freiberg provided one of the first theories about the nature of the rainbow, then developed by Antonius de Demini in 1611,
it was picked up and refined later by René Descartes. Later, the modern theory was proposed in the initial form by Thomas Young and, later elaborated in detail by Richard Potter and George Biddell Airy.
Let me, let me immerse the soul in the colors; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.
(Khalil Gibran)
Sunset is still my favorite color and the rainbow is the second.
(Mattie Stepanek)
No matter how old you are, who you are and where you are going, in front of the rainbow you will always be excited.
Angel Tirado
Each one is a rainbow and not a single color.
(Carlos Santana)
| All photos were taken by my Samsung galaxy S5 phone and edited by Photoshop Express. |
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