By passing a narrow beam of sunlight through a triangular-shaped glass prism, Newton showed that sunlight is composed of a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow.
Newton called this spread of colors a spectrum.
White light is a combination of all the colors.
Sunlight is an example of white light.
color by reflection
The color of an opaque object is the color of the light it reflects.
The color of a transparent object is the color of the light it transmits.
The material in the glass that selectively absorbs colored light is known as pigment.
Yellow-green light is the brightest part of sunlight.
You can make almost any color at all by overlapping red, green, and blue light and adjusting the brightness of each color.
Red, green, and blue are additive primary colors.
color overlapping: red+green=yellow, red+blue=magenta, blue+green=cyan
When two colors are added together to produce white, they are called complementary.
Every color has some complementary color that when added to it will produce white.
When paints or dyes are mixed, the mixture absorbs all the frequencies each paint or dye in it absorbs.
Magenta, yellow, and cyan are the subtractive primary colors.
Scattering is a process in which sound or light is absorbed and reemitted in all directions.
An excited state is a state with greater energy than the atom's lowest energy state.
After an excited atom emits light, it returns to its normal state.