Science Facts

In the 17th century, Isaac Newton discovered that prisms could split up white light into a spectrum of colors. He also showed that the spectrum could be recombined to recreate white light. Newton was the first to use the word spectrum in describing his experiments. Today we call the band of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the human eye the visible spectrum. We call the colors such as red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet the spectral colors and they correspond to narrow bands of wavelengths. Light that has longer wavelengths than the spectral colors are called ultravoilet, while light that has shorter wavelengths are called infrared. Humans cannot generally see ultraviolet or infrared, but there are some animals that can. Most animals evolved to have a visible range that matches what is called the optical window, which is the range of light that can pass through the atmosphere.