Martin Fone delves into the science — and art — of the rainbow.
A rainbow never fails to enchant, a transient moment of celestial beauty, even though it is one the commonest of meteorological phenomena. For Keats it was enough to admire it for what it is, railing against Isaac Newton in 1817 for destroying ‘the poetry of the rainbow’ by ‘reducing it to a prism’ and, in Lamia (1820), lamenting that scientists ‘will… conquer all mysteries by rule and…
