How many colors are there in a rainbow?
That’s kind of like asking how many stairs there are on a hill. Colors (or colours) are thought of as distinct steps by the Crayola factory, and they would claim that there are only 100 of them (if you can afford the big box). Your computer manufacturer would tell you your monitor with 24 bit color has 16 million possible colors (and it uses millions of these to display a rainbow). In reality, there are an infinite spread of colors on a spectrum (rainbow), but some people assign steps to them so that we can deal with them finitely. Back to my analogy, you can put steps on a hill, but you don’t have to, and if you do, the number is completely up to you.
Since the spectrum is a continuous band of frequencies, the question is unanswerable—except, perhaps, as infinite.” This seemingly intentionally obtuse discussion continues with the assertion that neither the Greeks nor the Natchez Indians distinguished yellow from green since they had one term for both colors. Then, addressing “egregious examples of drawing boundaries where none exist,” the author reports, “In a recent survey, 41 percent of anthropologists said that there is no such biological thing as race.” And in the next paragraph, “Indeed, in a chemical sense, we really blend in with the people around us like spilled paint; your molecules and mine are continually drifting off the surface of our skin, breathed out of our noses, flaked off hair and scalps. Individuals don’t have sharp edges.” This pseudo-philosophizing becomes particularly unpalatable when contrasted with tantalizingly incomplete reminiscences of actual ideas from science. Perhaps most irritating is that the book s
A rainbow is composed of a continuum of colors from the entire visible electromagnetic spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet (750 to 390 nm respectively). In other words, every color that can be recogized by the human eye will be in a rainbow. An adult human male can distinguish 1 million colors. That’s an impressive number…until you realize that an adult female can recognize 3 million colors!