Video Transcript
Hello, my name is Karen. Today we're going to talk about how rainbows work. There are three main optical concepts that contribute to a rainbow, and that's refraction, reflection, and dispersion.
In the sky, there are tiny little water droplets everywhere, and the droplets range in size, but they're about one millimeter in size, or about the size of the tip of this pen here. If we take that size of the one millimeter water droplet, and we blew it up, 750 times, it would be about the size of this droplet, which I've drawn here. As sunlight or white light shown here enters the droplet, it's first refracted at this surface of the water here. That refraction bends the light in this direction towards the back of the droplet. When the light hits the back of the droplet, it is reflected off the backside, also called total internal reflection. That reflected light then goes out to the other side of the droplet and it exits the water droplet here. And it again refracts at that surface of the water here or gets bent. That bent light is then directed toward our eye. Because the water droplet has a property called refractive index that causes it to split the light or disperse the light into its different colors, when the light comes through the droplet and goes through and hits our eye, we see a rainbow. (3.0s)
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