I Love Rainbows

Rainbows are an important part of the mythology of many cultures.

The Greek messenger goddess Iris creates a rainbow as a path between the earth and the sky. Similarly in Norse mythology, the rainbow connects the homes of humans and the gods. In Chinese mythology, a rainbow is a slit in the sky created by the goddess Nüwa using stones of different colours. The rainbow is the bow of the Hindu god Indra, the god of lightening and thunder. In Christian mythology, the rainbow was sent by god as a promise that he would not send another flood to destroy the world. For Australian aboriginals, the rainbow serpent symbolises the life force of the people and the land. In Buddhism, the seven colours of the rainbow represent to the seven planets and seven regions of the earth and is also the highest state of life that can be attained before reaching nirvana.

 Rainbows are also the subject of contemporary culture, literature and music from the writing of Wordsworth, the music from the Wizard of Oz ,the gay pride movement and the fable that an Irish Leprachaun’s crock of gold can be found at the end of a rainbow.

 In 1666, Sir Issac Newton was the first to demonstrate that white light is a mixture of the spectrum of colours of visible light. While the colour spectrum is a continuum, different colours are able to be distinguished - red, orange, yellow, green blue and violet. Newton originally proposed that there are seven distinct colours, because seven is a prime number, and arbitrarily divided violet into indigo and violet.

 Rainbows occur when water droplets in the air are illuminated by sunlight when the sun is low in the sky. Sunlight is bent when it passes from air into water and the different colours are bent by different amounts and appear as distinct bands in the sky. Rainbows appear with red on the outside and violet on the inside because red light is bent less than violet light.

 

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