COLORS OF LIGHT
Light refers to the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can see.
Did you see how tiny is the portion occupied by visible light in the Electromagnetic wave spectrum?
The light is a very powerful tool used by man for exploring the universe around us. As light interacts with
matter, many of its properties were determined and were also altered by light itself. It is through the
continuous study of light that man came to understand and appreciate the living world, from the
composition of the stars light years away to observing the processes that occur within the living cell as they
happen.
Light makes us see everything around us. We can see objects because light that bounces off its surface
reaches our eye.
Visible light is an electromagnetic wave that our eyes can detect, while other members of electromagnetic
spectrum cannot. It moves at a constant speed in space.
Light travels so fast, it is approximated to travel at a speed of in a vacuum. This speed
decreases when light travels in a dense medium. This means that the speed of light is dependent on the
properties of the medium. In the case of light, it is dependent on the optical density of the medium.
VIOLET light is bent most. RED light is bent the least. Thus, a rainbow starts with the RED light being at
the topmost and ends with the VIOLET light being on the bottom.
Abstraction and Generalization
• Colors of light are hierarchically arranged as ROYGBIV according to frequency and energy of the colors of
light.
• Red happens to have the lowest frequency and the least energy.
• Energy and frequency increases as one moves from red light towards violet light.
• The color that has the highest energy has the shortest wavelength.
Remember these:
● The colors of light are only revealed when light is refracted and dispersed, when it hits a transparent or
refractive medium such as water, raindrops or glass prism.
● Refraction is the bending property of light as it passes through one transparent substance into another,
while dispersion is the splitting of light into seven distinct colors.
● Light is made up of seven (7) different colors: RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, INDIGO, and
VIOLET (ROYGBIV). These colors are arranged in the ascending order of frequency and energy and
descending order of wavelengths.
● Red has the longest wavelength that propagates at the lowest frequency and carries the least energy among
the seven colors of light.
● On the other hand, violet has the shortest wavelength yet carries the greatest amount of energy and
propagates at highest frequency.
● These colors of light are visibly seen in rainbows in the skies observed after the rain or storm, generally
during daytime.
● When light passes from a less dense to a denser substance, (for example passing from air into water), the
light is refracted (or bent) towards the normal.
● When white light passes from air into a glass prism, violet bends the most and red bends the least. The
other colors are bent by an amount between violet and red.
● When the light exits the prism, the light is separated into the colors in the visible spectrum.
● During the sunset all the blue light (bent the most) is scattered away and the light that reaches the eyes
is red which has a longer wavelength (bent the least). Thus, we see the sunset red.
● The colors of the object are the colors of light reflected from the object and transmitted to our eyes.
● The object appears black when all the colors of light were absorbed; appears white when all the colors of
light were reflected; and colored when some of the colors of light were reflected and some were absorbed.
