Let’s take as an example a simple and common phenomenon in the natural world: the rainbow.1 We can all agree that there is something enchanting about rainbows. Is their magic diminished if I explain to you the science of how they form? The poet Keats claimed that Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours.” In my view, far from ‘destroying its poetry,’ science only enhances our appreciation of nature’s beauty. See what you think.
Rainbows combine two ingredients: sunshine and rain. But the science behind the way in which they combine to create the arc of colour we see in the misty sky is as beautiful as the sight itself. Rainbows are made of broken sunlight that reaches our eyes after the Sun’s rays strike a billion raindrops. As the Sun’s rays enter each water droplet, all the different colours of light that make up sunlight slow down slightly to travel at different speeds, bending and separating out from each other in a process called refraction.2 They then bounce off the backs of the droplets, returning to pass through their fronts at different points, refracting a second time as they do so and fanning out into the colours of the rainbow
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