Why does white light split into 7 colours?

Answer 1

Those are just the "traditional" colors - there are many shades in between.

Also, no two people I know personally would draw the boundaries between blue, indigo, and violet in the same place. Indigo is simply not really a distinctive color, being just a kind of bluish-violet.

Answer 2

Light passing through a prism is bent, refracted. Higher frequencies are bent more than lower frequencies so reds pass through straighter than blues, and greens and yellows fall somewhere between.

When light hits an object some frequencies are reflected, some are not. Our brains assign codes to different frequencies so we can tell them apart. If an object reflects the 500 nanometer frequency we'll see it as blue-green. If it reflects 600 nanometer waves we'll see it as orange.

The spectrum is continuous, it doesn't have parts except as assigned by us for our purposes. The boundaries are imaginary but useful, like the State or County Line. In the range below what we can see we've created categories called 'radio waves' and 'infrared.' Above the range we can see we've created categories called 'UV' and 'x rays' and 'gamma rays.' They're the same stuff as 'light.' We just can't see them.

Answer 3

because different lights of different frequencies combine to form white light and when it passes through a prism the lights return back to their frequencies.the light of highest frequency(voilet)bends the most.

Answer 4

by a prism!...it i scalled the

A2. White light contains ALL the colours, of which there are hundreds able to be distinguished from each other. For simplicity, (and our colour circle) we have chosen to name 7.

White light does not contain the shades, those with grey or white in their makeup, such as pink or many of the purples. These require the addition of several colours to make them.

A beam of white light may conveniently have its component colours spread out with the use of a prism or a diffraction grating. The water droplets in a cloud do this for us to form a rainbow.

Answer 5

This is possible because:

1) Light is a mixture of different colors.

2) The different colors react differently in some cases. For example, they have slight difference in their index of refraction; this makes it possible to separate the light with a prism.

Answer 6

White light is a mixture of all the visible frequencies of light. Hence, it can be split into constituent frequencies.