The rainbow procecure

[Queso]

there are droplets of some sort of liquid on this computer monitor. could be water, could be snot-i don't know. this isn't the first time i've seen them or anything, just the first time i've actually thought about them.

 

how does the liquid turn the light into all colors? the droplets are all colors of the rainbow, but what causes this?

[Fishteacher73]

It could be one of two things. The first (most likely) is that the dropplets act like little magnifying glasses. These magnify the little sets of pixels (I believe is what they are called) that emit three colors (magenta, cyan and green (again I think)). Just look very closely to a tv you can see these cells.

 

The other is that the dropplets act like little prisms and since there is varying thickness of the droplett there is varying defraction of the white light and the production of the rainbow.

[Queso]

amazing. :)

[Turtle]

___Just what I would have said Fish; except the monitor colors are Red, Green, Blue (RGB). The Cyan, Magenta, Yellow(& sometimes Black) scheme is used in printing. There are several systems for constructing primary color systems & some work additively & others work subractively. Even defining the rainbow has argument as to whether there are 6 or 7 colors depending if you include Indigo.

___The aim of them all of course is to find quantification for all colors which brings us to our infinity discussions because of course there isn't enough time for a human to list all possible colors. That said, I now return to spitting on my monitor.