The Rainbow Bridge in mythology

n Norse mythology, the rainbow is the road between the worlds of gods and men. It is a substantial thing:Horses are ridden over it, their hooves clattering; Heimdall, the gods’ watchman, even built his house uponit. At Ragnarok, the "doom of the gods," when the fire ogres and frost giants storm up it to destroy the gods’home, the rainbow bridge will break.To think of a rainbow as the "bridge to the divine" is commonthroughout world mythology. Raymond L. Lee Jr. and Alistair B. Fraser, authors of

The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth, and Science

, found the concept in Zulu, Navaho, Hawaiian, Japanese, Cambodian,Greek, Australian Aborigine, Chumash, and Hopi myths, as well as the Norse. "The apparently huge size of a rainbow seen in distant rain," they write, "makes the notion of a bridge to heaven’s heights easilyunderstandable."Turning the myth into a metaphor, inThe Rainbow Bridge Lee, an adjunct professor at the U.S. Naval Academy,and Fraser, a professor of meteorologyat Penn State, show how the rainbowcan also bridge science and art — andhow it often fails to do so.Beginning in the 17th century, theywrite, "artists increasingly portrayed[the rainbow] as incidental visual filler,an impressive landscape component, or an object of scientific curiosity." Theydidn’t, however, get the optics right.They set the rainbow at incorrect anglesto the sun, or colored it in impossiblehues. Yet as rainbow science improved,artists’ representations generally didnot. Much of what we recognize as a rainbow — in art or advertising — could never appear in nature (or,as Lee and Fraser put it, describing one modern ad, "Reality is pretty clearly on holiday here").The early artists were not really at fault. The full explanation of how a rainbow "works" wasn’t availableuntil James Clerk Maxwell presented his theory of optics in 1862. Lee and Fraser trace the history of our understanding of rainbows, asserting that "the rainbow bridge links the sciences to their past."

The Rainbow Bridge

takes us from Aristotle through Avicenna to Theodoric of Freiburg, who "plausibly(although not quite correctly)" used refraction and reflection within a raindrop to explain the rainbow’scolors; then through the "farfetched model" of the greatest geometer of the 15th century and the"maunderings" of the father of electricity in the 16th; to "Kepler’s rainbow muddle," Descartes"groundbreaking essay," and Newton’s "truly satisfactory account of the rainbow’s colors"; until finally wereach Maxwell’s full explanation."Optically, the rainbow is just adistorted image of the sun," Lee andFraser write in the appendix, "A FieldGuide to the Rainbow." "Think of thedrops as imperfect one-way mirrors,"the authors suggest. "The light formingthe primary rainbow is that refracted onentering the drop, reflected at his rear,and refracted a second time on exiting."When light passes through the air-water boundary, it is split into its spectrum,