Rainbow

A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a nearly continuous spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the sun shines onto falling rain. It is a multicoloured arc with red on the outside and violet on the inside. The full sequence of colours is most commonly cited as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, though it is important to note that this is an inconsistent list; all primary and secondary colors are present in some form, but only one tertiary. It is commonly thought that indigo was included due to the different religious connotations of the numbers six and seven at the time of Isaac Newton's work on light, despite its lack of scientific significance and the poor ability of humans to distinguish colors in the blue portion of the visual spectrum.

Rainbows as a Reflection of Culture

In today's culture, the rainbow comes in many various forms, simple and complex, colorful and drab. Could the rainbow be yet another cross-section of reality that changes form (for better or worse) in the grip of human hands? Or is the rainbow just more evidence that we represent things in a way that is only good enough to retain a loose meaning of a perception, and in this way we sometimes veer off course from objective truth, and towards the truth we *see* with our own perception.

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Yet Newton's (and our own) categorization certainly simplifies things when trying to recreate a rainbow with only seven crayons, or even two. Yet just a rumply top half of a circle drawn with two black lines as in the Hawai'ian petroglyph conveys the idea of the rainbow in our minds, perhaps evoking a memory of the good old times, remains good enough to represent the idea -- the idea being that even Newton's seven-colored rainbow falls far short of describing the rainbow as a whole...

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(And upon closer inspection of the rainbow under the nanoscope of quantum physics,

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we find complexities of magnitudes which lie in stark contrast to the simplicity

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that humans have attributed to the idea of the rainbow for thousands of years.)

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Looking past the physical fundamentals, the beauty of the rainbow resides in that it has ALL the visible colors; all these colors that make up white light, the light which is the key to life and is the source of energy for all life-forms.. However one cannot say that white light, to the naked eye, is any more beautiful than the colors which comprise it...

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