Why does white light have colours and how do you see them?

It is only when the rays of sunlight are split that we can see white light is made of different colours. Rainbows have this effect of splitting sunlight and so does the triangular-shaped block of glass called a prism.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet are the seven colours into which light can be broken down, as any rainbow will show. These colours are waves of electromagnetic radiation from the sun which move through the air at different speeds. Together they are known as a spectrum. If a prism is placed in the path of a spectrum, it will reverse the ray-splitting process and combine the different colours into white light once more.

 

Picture Credit : Google

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