Colors of Light

Were you able to get good sets of data from the activity? Did you enjoy watching how the rainbow colors appear in the paper? Light is a kind of energy that can travel through space in a form of wave. Light from the sun or flashlights looks white, but it is really a mixture of many colors. The colors in white light are red, orange, yellow, green, blue indigo and violet. We highlight here the arrangement of colors of light as ROYGBIV when dispersion happens. Dispersion is a kind of refraction which provided us colors of light. This phenomenon is observed when white light passes through a prism.

A prism is a transparent optical element with flat and polished surfaces that disperses light. Usually a prism has a triangular base and rectangular sides. Prisms can be made from any transparent materials like glass, plastic or fluorite. Water in a glass can also acts as prism. It also breaks white light into constituent colors namely: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (ROYGVIB). You can see these colors when you look at a rainbow in our sky. A rainbow is caused by both the reflection and refraction of light in water droplets on the Earth’s atmosphere. The water droplets serve as tiny prisms that refract, reflect, and disperse sunlight into spectrum of light appearing in the sky.