THERE ARE NOT SEVEN COLOURS IN THE RAINBOW



Actually there's a very large number of distinct colours in any rainbow. And neither are there sharp divisions between the bands of colour, yet numerous textbooks depict them. In reality, between yellow and green we find yellow-green, and between green and yellow green is greenish yellow green, and on and on. How many colours are in a rainbow? Thirty? Sixty? It's not easy to say, for it depends on the particular eye, and the particular rainbow. What of the teachers and students who look in vain for the yellow-green in their textbook's depiction of rainbows? They've crashed into a long-running textbook misconception: the strange idea that rainbows have exactly seven distinct bands of colour and no more, and with nothing in between those uniform bands of 'official' colour.

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