Mario Figueroa Colon: Physics of Rainbow

So many topics in physics to think about and to write about because physics is in our everyday life and we can put physics in almost anything but I found one very interesting and it is rainbows. Rainbows are very rare you can see them but you can’t touch them depending from where you see it you can see it very large or very short if you’re in a plane you can see a full circle not just the arc these ones are called glory. Some legends say that “rainbows were once used to symbolize snakes, and that they for-tell the arrival of evil." In other places rather they symbolize God's promise to never send another flood to destroy the whole world.

Rainbows have seven colors starting from down to the top we can see red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet also known as Roy G. Biv, from these seven colors the white light is made that means the sun light is made of the same seven colors we can see that with a prism the prism can break the white light in the seven colors of the rainbow. On cloudy days rain drops act like the prism and let us see the rainbow breaking or bending the sunlight. This can be also made without the rain or even in the dark just with a disk and a flashlight what it happens is that the light bends when you use the flashlight on the disk and the light made refraction so the colors of the rainbow are seen.  Yes refraction not reflection the refraction meaning is the fact or phenomenon of light, radio waves, etc., being deflected in passing obliquely through the interface between one medium and another or through a medium of varying density.

These phenomena mechanics have been study for a long period of time Descartes was one that studied rainbows. Descartes made a sketch describing the conditions required to see a rainbow that it says the sun have to be directly behind him and the light that reflects from the raindrops are to be ahead of him between 40.6 degrees and 42.2 degrees centered point where the shadow of the head would be. 

The eye forms the image on the retina, where the light is sensed, the cornea those 80% of the refracting work. Our eyes can’t detect light emitted from objects mostly infrared the light we can see is from the sun or artificial light. When we see objects we see reflected light immediate bouncing of incident light. Occasionally we see light that has been absorbed then reemitted at a different wavelength (time delay but just a tiny fraction). 

That’s how our eye can see the rainbow is very fascinating all of these and there’s plenty more to study about all these wave of lights and how to make a better perform of the eye I believe that studying these phenomena mechanics we can build a lot of different useful machines for energy resources and also for human eye performances as some new glasses that can be adjustable for many scale of view. Rainbows are very interesting phenomena that could teach us much more.