Stuff You Should Know - Selects: Rainbows: Delighting humanity since forever

Episode Date: August 5, 2023

Rainbows seem to defy nature, but they're really pretty simple when it comes down to it. Turns out it's just light reacting to water droplets in the air. But they sure do look cool. Learn all about how rainbows are formed in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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that revolutionize How We Party. Listen to the history of the world's greatest night clubs on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. Not a double rainbow coming your way, just a single rainbow. In this select episode from February 3, 2015, the year of our Lord! This one is Rainbows, Colan, Delighting Humanity, Since Forever.

If I'm not mistaken, that was a Josh Clark title, and I love it. Good job, my friend. Check it out. We explain all about how rainbows work, and now you can know too. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry Rowland.

Have we ever said Jerry's last name? I don't think so. Well, we have now. It's out there. It's on the internet even. Someone really updated our Wikipedia page if you look slightly. It's robust. It even says that their producer Jerry Jerome Rowland. How do they know that? I guess I've said it on the podcast before. I am sure that you have. So how are you doing? I'm great, man. Rainbows. As the author points out, they've inspired countless fairy tales, songs and legends.

Man, I love Rainbows. I think Rainbows are just fantastic. They're probably the greatest graphic design of all time. I just think rainbows are great. Well, it is funny to when you read the different articles that all people, it's kind of corny when they talk about how they delight and astound, but... Right. Darn it. When you see your rainbow, even as a jaded cynical adult, I can... There's no way you can't look and just go, oh, that's pretty neat.

Yeah, at the very least, you'll go, oh, a rainbow. If somebody says, hey, there's a rainbow over there, you're going to look up. I don't care. And if you doubt a rainbow's ability to astound adults, all you have to do is look up your Simbady Bear's Double Rainbow video, which I watched today. It's pretty, pretty great stuff. All bear vascas. Yeah.

Yeah, that guy's, he's. What does it mean? He's so delighted. I know what it means. You're on peyote. You know, next time someone does see a rainbow and say that, I'm going to test everything and just say, so I'm going to look.

All right. See if they just think I'm dead inside. Let's see what happens. All right. I'm curious to see whether you can not look. Of course I look. So Chuck, we're not the first to be delighted and amused by rainbows.

It goes back several years, decades at least. If they've been around forever. There is a lot of mythology surrounding them because they're unusual, they're unusual. They don't happen every day. And well, I guess it depends on where you live. Sure. But it's not necessarily a normal occurrence.

No, I found that the philosopher Descartes, René Descartes, was the first to describe kind of the modern, accurate theory in 1637. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Nice. He's the first one and it37. Oh yeah, yeah, nice. He's the first one and it's like, hey, wait a minute, there's some refraction and going on here. Right, well, most people usually associate that with Newton.

Yeah, well, he's the first one to describe the spectrum, right? He was, and apparently I saw this cool video by Philip Ball on the Atlantic, that basically it said that Newton just made up the Roigi Biv spectrum. What do you mean? So the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo violet is Newton's interpretation of the rainbow. Before that, all sorts of different cultures had different ideas

of what made up a rainbow. How many colors there were, what the colors were, and our interpretation of the rainbow spectrum is a Newtonian invention. And a lot of people say, it's not seven, it's actually six, Indigo, not really very Newton. And apparently Newton was trying to shoehorn the rainbow spectrum into the musical octave. So he's trying to shoehorn music, which has sound, wavelengths, with light, which has wavelengths, and making them one and the same, but history is kind of shown like, another six. We'll go with six for the rainbow.

So, Roigie Biv, which we learned in school, apparently I learned school you did too. Oh yeah, yeah, sure. It's just Roigie Biv. There's no need to go. Yeah, well, he was busy making his cookies from figs too. So, he had lots of stuff going on. Those are good.

Oh yeah, I can mow on some pig nutins. Yeah, because they're good for you So you can eat the whole bag when sitting if you want. Yeah, I'd never buy them But if I see them on like if you give blood or something they're on a snack table That's when I get my fake Newton on Yeah, so Newton was the only one before Newton there was like a whole Celtic legend about the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There was God saying more, bad, after the great flood

and promising it would never happen again by showing rainbows come out after rains. Like it's fine, it's stopping. We're not going to flood the earth again. Yeah. Of course, you can't find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow because you cannot go to the end of a rainbow. Yes. You can't go under a rainbow. You can't go over a rainbow.

And we'll explain all this why in just a second. Sure. But first, we have to talk about to get to the bottom of how rainboats work, which to me I think is awesome. It's one of those things where, okay, this is how it works. We understand it now. I love science stuff like that. Baked in science. Yes. Just done. It's not like, scientists think this is what's happening.

And that's probably true, but that remains to be seen. This is one of those ones where we know how rainbows work and here's how. But to get to the bottom of rainbows, we have to understand how light works first. Yeah, and I thought this article, even though there was a lot more digging into do, I thought the shopping cart explanation for basically how light travels was pretty darn good. Fantastic.

You know, one reason they say visible spectrum is because the light is moving so fast that you can't see it. It's like in the combination of all those is white light, like the sun is moving so fast that you can't see it. It's like, and the combination of all those is white light, like the sun is white light because all those colors are superimposed on one another. Okay, yeah. But when it hits like a water droplet or something else, it's gonna slow down enough,

and we'll get to all this, where you can see those individual parts of the spectrum. Right, and that shopping cart explanation, like you said, it definitely simplifies the whole thing. And it's not quite right, but it does a pretty good job of illustrating the principles that are going on, you know? Yeah, so basically light is moving at different speeds, depending on what kind of medium it's traveling through.

Right. So like I said, when it hits water, it's going to slow down a lot and it's going to change its speed. said, when it hits water, it's gonna slow down a lot, that's gonna change its speed. If you're pushing a shopping cart, the asphalt is the medium. If you push it on the grass, it's gonna slow down. That's a new medium. It's a new medium.

It's transition from one media to another. That's right. And if you hit that grass at an angle, and we've probably done this, if you had a were able to steal a shopping cart as a kid. You were pushing your friends around in it. All right. You're hauling through the neighborhood

and you hit that grass at an angle and it's gonna take a really sharp turn because that front right wheel, let's say, is gonna hit the grass and all of a sudden really quickly, it's gonna be traveling at a much slower speed than the rest of it. And your friend's gonna tumble out and everyone's gonna have a good time.

Exactly, just where you're helmet. So, that imagine that the shopping car is a photon of light, or a beam of white visible sunlight. And the grass is a prism. Yeah. So, the parking lot was air, and it was moving through, just fine, no problem. But when it hit that prism, it slowed down. Yes. And because it came at an angle, one side of the

light hit sooner and it made it turn. And that is called refraction. The bending of light is refraction. Yeah. And in the case of a rainbow, that prism is a raindrop. So, I mean, this is the simple quick version. We'll get more detailed, but when it hits that raindrop, it's going to slow down and it's going to bend. So depending on the refractive index, which is how much light bends, depending on the wavelength, the wavelength of light,

which is another term for color, is going to bend at a different angle. So when that visible light, which is all the colors of the visible spectrum combined, hits a prism and it bends or a raindrop, right? It bends at different angles because the wavelengths are different. And so that visible light comes undone

into its component wavelengths, which are all the colors of the rainbow, and they spread out. It's called dispersion. Right. Yeah. And that's it, really. But like I said, in this case, we're talking about rain. And because rain drops are all different shapes and sizes, it's not going to be as consistent as like a prism might be,

but it's going to have the same effect. It's going to hit the rain drop. It's going to slow down like the wheel digging into the grass of the shopping cart. And it's going to refract. And some of it's going to keep going. Some of it's going to bounce back, but the different color is going to bounce at a different angle. And it's all relative to where you are on the ground.

Like, no person, two people see the same rainbow. Right, so, it's all subjective. Right, so when light hits the prism and it bends, like you said, because the different lights have different wavelengths, different colors have different wavelengths, different colors have different wavelengths. Red has the longest wavelength, so it bends the least. I believe violet has the shortest wavelength,

so it bends the most. But because, again, because these different wavelengths, they bend differently so that the light spreads apart, and when it exits the prism, it bends again, and it forms that spectrum of separated light. Separate it out. And you notice we keep saying the word bend, that's why a rainbow is an arc instead of a right angle because the light is bending. So Chuck, we've been teasing this a little bit, but we'll get into exactly how you go from prism to raindrop and hence to rainbow right after this. The End to be able to cheat death. We have an agreement to keep each other's secret. Cassie, we have the wings. This is native land.

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Alright, if you want to see a rainbow, or if you're going to see a rainbow, there need to be three conditions. The sun's got to be behind you. Big one. You're going to have moisture in front of you. And the sun must be shining. That sun, those sun's rays must be shining at 42 degrees of what's called the anti-solar point, which is basically where the shadow of your head is on the ground. Okay. So if you can see the shadow of your head, that's going to be that 42 degree anti-solar point.

Right. So what you do is you put your back directly to the sun, right? Yeah. And then turn 42 degrees, which I guess if it were negative 42 degrees, you'd be turning to the left. So I guess you'd be turning to the right a little bit about 42 degrees, which you can kind of measure off in your head. It's not quite 45 degrees. And if you're looking at rain and the sun's behind you, yeah, you're gonna see where that 42 degrees is because once you hit that point, there's your rainbow. Yeah, but I mean, you can move your body around and still see the rainbow. I mean, it's where the sun is hitting.

The sun's got to be hitting it at 42 degrees. I see. Okay. So Chuck, it doesn't matter then where your head is. It's the rain drops relation to head is. It's the rain drops, relation to the sun. It is the sun. It needs to be 42 degrees.

The sun shines. The producer rainbow? Yeah, the sunshine must be hitting it at 42 degrees. Okay, so let's get back to basics again for a second. When the sunlight hits the rain drop, each individual rain drop is acting like a prism, right? That's right. So that visible white light is hitting a raindrop.

Yeah. It's hitting it at an angle. It's going kaboom into like a colored spectrum inside the raindrop. And then it's going to reflect back again, refract again, exiting the raindrop. So it bends again. Yeah. And it comes back at you. Right. The thing is, is when you see a light, colored light wavelength from a raindrop,

you're not seeing the whole spectrum, you're not seeing millions of little rainbows, you're seeing one big rainbow. That's right. And the reason why is because each individual raindrop, depending on its relation to you and I guess to the sun, is shooting one color at you. That's right. It's shooting all colors at you, but you're only picking up on one color because there's only one color from a raindrop

that is angled correctly to you in your line of sight so that the only one you're picking up on is red. That's right. And then all of the raindrops around that raindrop are doing the same thing. They're shooting about in relation to your line of sight red towards you. But then the raindrops a little lower than that are shooting yellow, then lower than that green and so on and so on and so you get to violet. And so these groups of ra these groups of rain drops are producing this rain bow

cumulatively as far as your line of sight is concerned. Yeah because the rain is just falling so where it is in the sky I mean as it falls it's gonna be changing color. Right. You know it's not like frozen in mid air anything. But it seems like it but it seems like it. Right. Exactly. Isn it's not like frozen in mid-air or anything. But it seems like it, but it seems like it. Right. Exactly. Isn't that phenomenal? It really is. I just think that's just as cool as it gets. Yeah, it's super cool. And you'll always notice too, the sky under the rainbow is going to be brighter than out. Mm-hmm.

And when you've got a double rainbow, which we'll get to, the area between those two is usually really dark. And that's called the Alexander's Dark Band. Yeah, Alexander's Band because he was Alexander Afro-Desias was the first dude to describe that. That's a great name. Alexander Afro-Desias. Yeah, that is pretty good. It sounds like a 70s exploitation movie or something.

Totally. But yeah, so the reason why in between the double rainbows you have Alexander's band is because the light there is reflecting away from you. And so it's a dark area. So the sunlight hitting those rain drops is going, be away. You're like, oh, it's a dark area. Yeah. So the sunlight hitting those rain drops is going, be away. Yeah.

You're like, oh, it's dark. Inside the rainbow, all of that light is reflecting back to you. Yeah. And you're seeing all of the different colors come at you, and they're recombining indivisible light, so there's no color. It's just bright sunlight in the middle. Yeah.

And that, you know, sunlight, they also always describe it as white. I mean, sunlight is all the colors. We just, you know, can't see it. Yeah, we should really do a whole how color works episode. Yeah. It's fascinating stuff. But yeah, depending on whether you're a painter who's mixing chemical color, whether you're a chemist or a physicist, white is either the presence of all colors or the absence of color. Right. You know? It's going to mind blowing. We should totally do how color works. Well, I guess after this break we'll talk a little bit more about the double rainbow all the way

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Listen to Sound of our Town on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a story of a man who's fascinated me, haunted me really, for most of my life. His name was Sweet Daddy Grace. He was ahead of his time, a Cape Verdean immigrant who built a fortune as a black man during Jim Crow, during the Depression. But today, outside of his church, not too many people know about the man affectionately known as Sweet Daddy Grace. Erase, sort of wiped out and I wonder if this was done intentionally. And there's one more piece of the puzzle. My cousins always said that we were related to Daddy Grace,

but here's where things get murky. Every time I ask the elder members of our family, they flatly denied it. My dad kind of looked at him like in the devil. I'm Marcy Dupina. It's taken me years to find the courage to make this show. Listen to Sweet Daddy Grace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Chuck, you want to talk about double rainbows and what forms them?

It's pretty much the same thing, right? Yeah, the lights refracted twice. Yeah, it's just a double refraction. Yeah, what's cool is if you look at a double rainbow, the one on top, the higher one, that's the second refraction, is reversed. So rather than red being on the top, it's on the bottom. Yeah, it's a reverse rainbow is what a double rainbow is. And you can have a triple and even a quad, but it's rare.

Yeah. Like I've seen a little bit of a triple once, I think, to where you just see the faintest hint of that third one. And if you're seeing that, that means the, and this, I think it's called the primary and secondary. That means your primary is super, super, super sharp. Yeah, to where it looks like it's drawn on the sky, painted on the sky.

Nice. And then your secondary is gonna be a little more faint than the third one, because the triple refraction, you know, it's not the easiest thing to occur in nature. Yeah, and one of the things that makes the primary rainbow, and then hence the secondary, and I guess tertiary, and so on, rainbow's bright, is the amount of sunlight and the number of raindrops, because remember, those raindrops that you're seeing that the spectrum is made up of light wavelengths that's coming at you

from a bunch of different raindrops and they reinforce one another and the more they reinforce one another, the brighter the rainbow is. Yeah, and you'll, I mean, I feel like I usually see rainbows when it's not raining where I'm standing. But that doesn't matter. It's, you know, you can be being rained on and still see the rainbow. Well, yeah, but it's like sometimes it's like a super light rain where it's just rain really hard Maybe it's tapering off or maybe stopped all together, right?

But the point is where the rainbow is It's not like they said earlier you can't drive up to a rainbow Like I'm gonna go up and find that thing because it's a it's just a perspective trick basically Right, they only apparently from this scientific American article you sent, the only visual information we get from a rainbow is the band of its arc. Yeah, and everything else is what's around it. Right. So, like, if a rainbow seems really huge, it's because, say, the mountains in the background

look small, which makes the rainbow by contrast look very big and majestic. If we're close to say like the mountains are like a cell phone tower or something like that, the rainbow may look very small by comparison. Yeah, and the way they liken it and that, I think, and that article I think was the human head. It's like roughly the same size,

but if it was right in front of your face it would block out a whole movie screen. But if it was further away, it would just be like, hey, there's that guy's head out there. It's the same thing. Same thing. And then Phil Platt, who does the bad astronomer blog for Slate, he did a pretty good explanation

of full circle rainbows. Yeah, I had never ever heard of that until you sent me that. So it makes sense, though. It totally does. did a pretty good explanation of full circle rainbows. I had never ever heard of that until you sent me that. It makes sense though. It totally does. So remember we talked about a rainbow arcing over the sky and it's because the light is bent out of the prism.

Well, no, it's because it starts on one part of the ground and ends on another part of the ground, right? Where the goal is. The reason why it has that arc is because what you're seeing is part of what really is a full circle and it's depending on where you are. Now you have a certain amount of rain drops available to reflect the light to you. So when you're on the ground and you're looking up or just over to the horizon, you have a certain amount of rain drops available to you to form a rainbow.

Yeah. If you were able to get away from the ground, you have even more rain drops, not just above you, but now below you as well. Yeah. And you can see a full circle that is the actual real rainbow. Yeah. So a real rainbow depending on where you are in relation to the ground, is either a part of a circle

and arc or a full circle. Yeah, and there was a picture. I mean, he said that pilots see him all the time, or I guess if you're in a stuute flyer that's not just like a sleep with a black blanket over your face. You can look at a window of a plane and see one too, because you're above it. Right.

It's pretty neat. I mean, that was the photo of one and it was like, oh wow, there's a full circle rainbow. Full circle rainbow. It looks kind of like a lens flare. A little bit, but it's a rainbow lens flare. And fill plate head in that same blog post, a double circle rainbow, which was really neat.

Yeah. So go check that out. I agree. That was pretty cool. Yeah, you know that thing we were talking about earlier too, about the perspective. That's why the, I think I thought you'd done it. Don't be dumb about why the moon looks bigger. Have you done that?

No, it's, so why can you see the moon during the day sometimes? Oh. Why is that? Well, I'll tell you why. Because I saw it like one the other day that was like super late in the day. Well, the reason why, a better question is why can't you see the moon all the time even during the day? So it's not, the moon's very bright.

It's the brightest object in the sky second only to the sun. But it also gets its light from the sun. So most of the time when you can't see the moon during the day, it's because the moon is behind you. So the light that it's getting from the sun is behind you. Now if the moon is closer to the sun, like depending on where the moon is in its lunar phase, then you can look up and see the sun, like depending on where the moon is in its lunar phase, then you can look up and see the sun and the moon at the same time.

It's above the horizon in other words. So if the moon were always visible above the horizon, you'd always be able to see it during the day. Gotcha. And it just has to do with where it is in relation to the sun in the lunar phase. Does that make sense? Yeah. If it's, just go watch the sun, in the lunar phase. Does that make sense? Yeah. If it's, just go watch the Dumpy Dumb on it.

Yeah, they call that a bonus, an impromptu bonus. Yeah. But the reason why the moon will look really huge in this guy is because the same thing we're talking about with the perspective, like the mountain, is like when you're low on the horizon, it's gonna look enormous. Right.

If there's a lot less stuff. Yeah. And near close to you, it's gonna look enormous. Right. If there's a lot less stuff. Yeah, near close to you. Yeah, it's gonna look very big. Yeah, and when I went to Montana years ago, my explanation I got, because you step off the plane and you think, wow, this guy does look bigger. Like what's the deal?

They call it big sky country and it really does look bigger. And the explanation I got from the locals was it's because the clouds So again, it's just a perspective trick So the like the mountains are way over there. I think it's just the clouds that they typically get are the big huge puffy right clouds and But they look big in relation to the mountains in the distance. Yeah, I think that's the deal So it makes the sky appear to look larger Plus I imagine also there's fewer obstacles and obstructions. So there's more sky to see

and take in just looking around, right? Yeah, like when I live in Yuma, you go out in the desert, and you can see like 180 degrees from horizon to horizon. But they don't have the cloud formations. So the sky looks bigger in Montana than it does like in the middle of the desert. Yeah. Because most of the time in the desert, you're gonna see that just blue, nothing but blue. Yeah. So there's no perspective. Nice.

You know, like when you take a picture of something to sell on eBay, you put your fists next to it. So people know how big it is. Is that what people think? Well, sure. I think quarters and rulers never seem to fit. Yeah, that's quarters and rulers. So people know how big it is. Is that what people think? Well, sure. I think quarters and rulers never seen this. Yeah, that's quarters and rulers.

That's probably a better rule of thumb. Yeah, right. So Chuck, I got a couple other things. Apparently, when you look at a rainbow, it's not an even division or an even representation of all the colors. You see the most red. It's the most visible. Apparently 38% of

rainbows red. Green is second at 15. Blue is the least at just 11%. What is green? Green is 22%. Okay. 22% of rainbows? Green. Interesting. I wonder what color blind we need to do on color blindness, but it's um I looked into the article and it was just sort of started to melt my brain. Yeah Like all this stuff. So I just said no, put that on the back burner. I think you did a great job with this Well, we'll see. I'm sure we'll get stuff wrong And lastly the LGBT rainbow flag designed in 1978 by a guy named Gilbert Baker. Really? And it used to have eight. It had turquoise and hot pink on it before. Yeah. But apparently they ran out of fabric for hot pink because of things like started to take off.

So they discontinued that. And I think the same went for the turquoise one too. Interesting. So they just went with six. And now is it a, it's a, it's a shining monument for establishments. Right. For people to say, I want to go in there and some people to say, I don't want to go in there. Sadly. Right.

You know? We went to a gay bar in Philadelphia one afternoon. And I say by accident, not like it was a big deal. Was it the blue oyster? No. No, and it was in the afternoon. So it was just, you know, how it is in some bars in the afternoon.

It was like the serious regulars are in there. Sure. It doesn't matter, gay, straight, whatever. And they were very cool guys, and they were like, and it was a big group of us. And I think they were like, you know, you know, you're in a gay bar, right? And they were kind cool guys and they were like, and it was a big group of us. And I think they were like, you know, you know you're in a gay bar, right? And they were kind of pointing that out.

And I was like, oh, well great. Sort of me bloody Mary then. Right exactly. Like I didn't know if he thought we were, I think he knew we were from out of town. Sure. So he was like just a little bit. Yeah, yeah, like he didn't want any trouble.

Oh, gotcha. You know, I'm just like, we're not like that, my friend. That's just a happy accident. That was a good ending to the Rainbow episode. Yeah. If you want to know more about rainbows, go check out our article on the site. Rainbows just type that word into how stuff works. Go check out that slate post and scientific American and the Atlantic.

Some good stuff out there. And I said, search bar, I think, in there somewhere, which means it's time for listener mail. That's right. I'm going to call this Pliny, the beer. And this is from Cory. And I think Cory's in San Francisco. Hey, guys, love the podcast.

I was listening to Cinnamon today. There was an exchange about Pliny in a comment that there was one and only. I think anyone in the Bay Area would know that there are two Plinys, the Elder and the Younger. That's because one of our local breweries has a beer called Pliny, the Elder, which is known by beer, aficionados, as one of the best beers out there. In fact, it sells out weekly from local groceries. They also make, though, a Pliny the Younger,

which only comes out for two weeks a year, people wait in line for hours just to get a pint. And there is also a real historical Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, who is his nephew. I didn't realize it was his nephew. And is from Corey and I did look it up because the two weeks thing I did not believe it, but I just you know sometimes you want to see it with your own eyes and Yeah, plenty of the younger is a triple IPA Oh, wow, that sounds awesome name for the nephew and adopted son evidently and

It is pub draft only they don't even bottle it. Very limited distribution locally and it's seasonal so for just two weeks, a year in February at the Bay of Bengal. You can get it in a bar, I guess, in San Francisco. Nice. And it is a 10.25%er. Wow, yeah. Nice. And it is a 10.25%er. Wow.

Yeah. As opposed to 8 for the elder. Huh. And they're both IPAs? Yeah, ones that the double and the triple. So that is. And a lot. Yeah, and you can get the plenty of the elder in the bottles.

It's not quite as exclusive. We'll have to try that on our tour. Yeah, I guess only the elder. Yeah. Unless we'd luck out and happen to be there during our tour. Yeah, I guess only the elder and the someone, unless we'd luck out and happen to be there during that two week period, huh? Well, now it's in February, we're getting that March. Oh, is that what you said? But if there's a bar out there that maybe wanted to just say we're out.

Put it under the bar, save it for a month for us, we'll be there. I don't think that's going to happen. If you want to correct us after we get something flagrantly wrong, like we did with the whole Pliny thing, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can post it on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.com that has stuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyshadow.com. Stuffyshadow is a production of I Heart Radio.

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