Description

Before Newton, nobody knew that visible light was made up of seven different colours. People thought that light was just ‘light’ and that colours were a mixture of light and darkness. They thought that bright red was ‘light’ with just a little bit of ‘darkness’ and that deep blue was pretty much all ‘darkness’. But they were wrong!

Newton used a prism to split up light into the colours of the rainbow and project the rainbow onto a wall. To prove that the prism wasn’t colouring visible light, he then used another prism to refract, or bend, the light back together again. This caused all the colours to merge back together into what we call visible, or white, light. Pretty impressive, right?