C olor a n d Li g ht 145

Figure 5.3 The human eye responds to that very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum known as the visible
spectrum. However, it does not respond uniformly, as it senses the yellow-green region as the brightest and the red and blue
regions as the darkest.
CC-BY-SA-3.0/Philip Ronan

followed in descending order by orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, the shortest visible wavelength.
Wavelengths are measured in nanometers, each one-millionth of a millimeter, and range from 380 to 760 nanom-
eters. Wavelengths shorter or longer than this range, such as ultraviolet and infrared light, do not stimulate the
receptors in our eyes; hence we cannot see them.

In the 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) demonstrated that color is a natural part of sunlight or white light.
When he passed a beam of sunlight through a prism of transparent material, he found that as the light emerged
from the prism it dispersed, separating the individual wavelengths into different colors. These colors arranged
themselves according to the colors of a rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet (Figure 5.4).
Newton carried his experiment one step further by utilizing a second prism to mix the waves back into sunlight.
This verified the fact that color is basically made up of light and that when “colored” lights are mixed, the result
is white light.

INFRARED

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ITE LI
WH

ULTRA
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OPTICAL PRISM

Figure 5.4 The effect of passing rays of white light through a prism is to bend the shorter
wavelengths more than the longer wavelengths, thus separating them into distinctly identifiable bands
of color.