How rainbows actually form.
For rainbows to form, 2 things are needed: sunlight and rain. However, many people don’t realize that sunlight is not a white light, even though we see it as such. White, in fact, is a spectrum of different colors.
1. When sunlight enters a raindrop, the different colors are bent at various angles.
2. The different colors reflect off the inside of the back of the raindrop.
3. So when the sun is behind you and the rain is in front of you, you see a rainbow of colors from the inside of all the raindrops.
The rainbow isn’t made up of just 7 colors.
In many languages and cultures, kids are taught some mnemonic tricks to remember the order of the colors of the rainbow. An imaginary person, Roy G. Biv, comes to help here since his name is deciphered as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But that’s actually not the whole story.
There are a lot of various colors in the rainbow that blend. Between each color is a blend of colors, like turquoise, which can be found between green and blue.
There would be countless possibilities for colors in the rainbow, but since the order of 7 “main” colors is fixed, they don’t occur. For example, brown is a mix of red and green, but since these colors don’t stay next to each other, they don’t combine to create brown.
Both black and white are neither mixtures of different colors.
So, while you can see turquoise in the rainbow, there is no way to see white or black. That is because neither is a mix of the 7 primary colors. Black is what appears when color is not present, while white can be spotted when all colors combine. These occurrences cannot happen when it comes to a rainbow.
Nor are they considered to be colors at all by some definitions.
By scientific definition, color is simply the range of visible light that humans can see. Colors like white, black, and even pink are not present in the spectrum because our eyes aren’t mixing these wavelengths of light.
It’s also not possible to ever see gray in a rainbow.
Much like turquoise, gray is also a mixture that is made up of black and white. While it is, of course, not considered a color at all by scientific definition, it cannot be present in a rainbow. We can also use the description that color is all the ways human eyes process light or the lack of it. Sadly, even if we consider black and white to be legitimate colors, there is still no way for them to ever be in a rainbow, and, as a result, there’s no place for gray.
