The Pythagorean philosopher Philoalaus is the first known person to posit that the earth resolved around a “central fire” (rather than everything revolving around the earth). Newton not only associated color with music, but he postulated that the color spectrum was cyclical, like octaves. So how did it get applied to the rainbow? The circular route from Pythagaros to Newton Pythagoreanism influenced some of the most well-known classical thinkers, including Aristotle and Plato.Īnd thus we now have seven days of the week, seven liberal arts subjects, seven deadly sins, seven wonders of the world and seven dwarves. Pythagoras also started a school, and the ideas he espoused grew into a philosophy called Pythagoreanism, based on mathematics and mysticism. He further saw it as the sum of the spiritual (3) and the material (4). Noticing a pattern? Pythagoras did: his observations showed that 7 was a magical number that somehow connected disparate phenomena. He’s credited with discovering the fact that musical notes (of which there are seven) could be translated into mathematical equations, and he had a theory about how the heavenly bodies ( seven of which where known about at the time) moved according to mathematical patterns.
And he loved applying numbers to real-world phenomena. But why? We can trace the roots of this association back to the 6th century BC and a dude named Pythagoras 5. Or so those of us in Western Cultures have always been told. But how many divisions should there be…? Ancient Greece and the magic of 7 But Newton decided we should probably break this spectrum up into chunks, so we could more easily talk about it. It’s not a distinct set of colors but rather, well, a spectrum 4. So where does Sir Isaac come into this? In the 17th century, he was the one who realized that, when we break white light apart using a prism (or rain drops), we get the visual spectrum of colored light (otherwise known as the rainbow).Īs you can see, in the visual spectrum, each color bleeds into its neighbors. If you (like me) have a hard time wrapping your head around how red and green mix together to make yellow, watch this YouTube video. And light combines colors according to the the additive mixing method, which uses red, blue and green as primary colors 3.Īdditive color mixing. Um, what? The visual spectrumĬolor theory is a bit more complicated than stirring together the right finger paints. We mix pigments using the well-understood but confusingly-named subtractive method 1, which uses red, blue and yellow as primary colors 2. Who the bananas made that decision?!? And why? So in the rainbow, purple is subdivided into purple and more-blue-ish-purple. Awesome rainbow hairstyling courtesy of Azael Carrera.īut elementary school finger painting teaches us that there are three primary colors-red, yellow and blue-that combine to make three secondary colors-orange, green and purple-and (plus or minus some black and white paint) every other color imaginable. That’s six basic colors. Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton by Godfrey Kneller. BIV” is a handy reminder for the color sequence that makes up the rainbow.
There are seven colors in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
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