Do You Know the Colors of the Rainbow

There are vii colors in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, greenish, blue, indigo and violet. The acronym "ROY G. BIV" is a handy reminder for the color sequence that makes up the rainbow.

Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton by Godfrey Kneller. Crawly rainbow hairstyling courtesy of Azael Carrera.

Just elementary school finger painting teaches us that there are iii primary colors—crimson, yellow and blue—that combine to make iii secondary colors—orange, green and regal—and (plus or minus some black and white paint) every other color imaginable. That'southward half dozen basic colors.

So in the rainbow, purple is subdivided into regal and more-blueish-ish-royal. Who the bananas made that decision?!? And why?

The short answers: Isaac Newton. And Ancient Greek philosophy. Um, what?

The visual spectrum
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Color theory is a bit more complicated than stirring together the right finger paints. Nosotros mix pigments using the well-understood only confusingly-named subtractive method¹, which uses cherry, blue and yellow as master colors². Nonetheless wesee colors in lite waves. And low-cal combines colors according to the the condiment mixing method, which uses red, blueish and green as primary colorsⁱⁱⁱ.

So where does Sir Isaac come into this? In the 17th century, he was the 1 who realized that, when we break white light autonomously using a prism (or rain drops), we become the visual spectrum of colored low-cal (otherwise known as the rainbow).

Every bit you can see, in the visual spectrum, each color bleeds into its neighbors. It'south non a singled-out ready of colors but rather, well, a spectrum^iv. But Newton decided we should probably pause this spectrum up into chunks, then we could more easily talk about it. But how many divisions should in that location be…?

Aboriginal Hellenic republic and the magic of 7
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Via Reuters

Seven is lucky. Or so those of us in Western Cultures accept ever been told. Just why? Nosotros can trace the roots of this clan dorsum to the 6th century BC and a dude named Pythagoras⁵. Now, Pythagoras loved numbers. And he loved applying numbers to real-world phenomena. He's credited with discovering the fact that musical notes (of which at that place are seven) could be translated into mathematical equations, and he had a theory about how the heavenly bodies (seven of which where known about at the time) moved according to mathematical patterns.

Noticing a pattern? Pythagoras did: his observations showed that 7 was a magical number that somehow connected disparate phenomena. He further saw it every bit the sum of the spiritual (3) and the fabric (iv).

Pythagoras also started a school, and the ideas he espoused grew into a philosophy called Pythagoreanism, based on mathematics and mysticism. Pythagoreanism influenced some of the near well-known classical thinkers, including Aristotle and Plato.

And thus nosotros now have seven days of the week, seven liberal arts subjects, vii deadly sins, vii wonders of the world and 7 dwarves.

So how did information technology go applied to the rainbow?

The circular road from Pythagaros to Newton
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Newton non merely associated color with music, but he postulated that the color spectrum was cyclical, like octaves. Via Wikipedia.

The Pythagorean philosopher Philoalaus is the first known person to posit that the earth resolved around a "central burn down" (rather than everything revolving around the earth). This theory was in turn used past Copernicus, who is widely credited with developing the heliocentric theory of planetary move. And Newton relied on Copernicus' work when developing his own theory of gravity.

And then TL;DR Newton thought the Pythagoreans were pretty great.

When he started his work with color, he originally only subdivided the spectrum into five colors (red, xanthous, green, blue and purple), but revised the number to seven, calculation orange and indigo, because Pythagoras believed that at that place was a connection between color and music. And there are 7 natural notes, and then in that location should as well be seven main colors.

Math, music, numerology and a couple of dead guys. That, kids, is why there are seven colors in the rainbow.

How many colors practice you lot recollect should be in the rainbow? vi, 7 or other? Let the states know in the comments!"

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<sup>1. It's called subtractive considering yous're "subtracting" light every bit yous add colour. The more color you add, the darker you become. When y'all mix all iii colors y'all hypothetically get black, which is all lite subtracted. Totally intuitive, correct? </sarcasm>↩
2. To make things even more confusing, when you're talking most printing—which uses subtractive color mixing—you lot call the master colors CMYK: cyan (a shade of bluish), magenta (which is kind of blood-red-ish, I approximate?), yellow (okay, one of them is easy) and black (which is called k considering the "chiliad"ey plate in a printer is filled with blackness ink).↩
three. Additive because you lot're adding calorie-free. And if you mix all of the colors (or wavelengths) of light, they add up to white. ↩
4. If you desire to know more than, Wikipedia has a pretty sweet table of important spectral colors and their wavelengths.↩
v. Yup, the same guy who came upward with the aii+b2=c2 right triangle theorem.↩</sup>

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