. . .
. shine a Green and
Red Laser through
it . . .
The Physics:
Our eyes can see many colors of visible light. Sunlight is a mixture of
many colors together. Light from the sun looks white to our eyes. All
of the colors are in white light, they are just all mixed up. To see
all the colors separately, you can use a prism. A prism is a piece of
glass or plastic in the shape of a triangle. The colors of the rainbow
in order are: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
Many people remember this by the first letters that spell Roy G. Biv.
A prism works because the different colors of light travel at different
speeds inside the glass. Because the colors of light travel at
different speeds, they get bent by different amounts and come out all
spread out instead of mixed up. Violet travels the slowest so it is on
the bottom (least bent) and red travels the fastest so is on the top
(most bent). The other colors are somewhere in between. When the air is
full of water, like after a rainstorm, the water droplets act like a
prism and can make a rainbow. Rainbows are circular in shape because
the prisms (raindrops) that created them are spherical.
