The Inquiry 

I’ve decided to focus this post on rainbows, a mysterious array of colours in the sky that has made me wonder from a young age, how do they appear in the sky? Why do I only see them after it rains? Why are they in an arched shape?

I found a video by a channel called “its okay to be smart“, it explained everything I needed to know to answer my questions.

Video Prompt 

After watching this video, my questions were answered and I was shocked by the information I had been given. First of all, rainbows aren’t really there. All that is really up there in the sky is light and water. The white light that we see coming from the sun, is really just the appearance of the colours (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple). On a rainy day, there are thousands of droplets in the air, these droplets are pulled into a sphere by the small amount of surface tension and they catch light projecting the colours.

When the light enters the little droplet it refracts twice, on the way in and on the way out. The light does this because it is going from one medium to another (air to water), the second refraction causes the light to split and exit the droplet in different angles. This is why we see the array of different colours, because every colour of the rainbow exits the droplet at a different angle. 

Two Truths and One Lie

These are my three statements based on the knowledge from the video linked above, comment down below if you know which one is the lie!