MadSci Network: Physics |
Well, Manas, that's a good question, not one I've heard often. It shows a keen mind on your part, unless it's a question from your teacher. You ask why "all the seven colors emerge". Some say seven colors while some say six. Let's say ALL the colors (all the different wavelengths that exist at the source) come out parallel. Actually the source of light sends light in many different directions toward the glass and hits the glass in many different points. So there are many different bundles of those parallel colors. Before you can SEE any of that, the light must enter the pupil of your eye and be focused on your retina. When that happens, the parallel light is recombined to nearly the same combination of colors as the original source. The three types of cones in your retina respond to different ranges of frequencies and your brain will come up with an image. When the surfaces of the glass slab are not uniformly parallel, you will see color fringes that show that the rays did not emerge parallel to each other. In general, we call any grouping of colors "white" if it is the brightest combination of frequencies in the general spectral areas of red, green, and blue. I'm sure you know that TV screens and computer monitors only produce three colors, Red/Green/Blue. However, their tiny spots are beyond our limit of resolution at normal viewing distances, so we are always looking at many tiny PICture ELements (pixel) combined. These pixels will be made up of varying intensities of light in the red, green, and blue bands of our visible spectrum. So the thousands or millions of colors advertised by computer companies indicate the number of combinations of how bright each little screen spot is made. As an exercise, make a drawing of a light source and a glass slab. Draw two different rays striking the glass at different angles. Show each ray refracting in 3 slightly different directions in the glass (to represent the RGB scheme) and again as they emerge. I hope this helps you see what happens.
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