Reflecting On Refraction

A couple of days ago I was sitting at my favourite café early in the morning with a freshly brewed hot coffee in front of me. A light shower of rain began to fall. Within a minute or so a rainbow formed its arch across the sky. When I looked downwards at the creek that flows beside the café, I could see the rainbow reflected in the waters. (see photo)

The rainbow and its reflection in the water was a beautiful sight.

I was moved to reflect.

I recalled from my school days learning about the physics of how a rainbow is formed. Light is refracted, reflected, and dispersed into its constituent colours by the drops of rain. Most people know the colours of the rainbow from the initials: ROYGBIV. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. These are the classic seven colours of the rainbow. Most of us know that the section of the electro-magnetic spectrum that we see as light is made up of many more colours than these seven. It is though, these seven that we classically associate with a rainbow.

I reflected further.

The rainbow is a pleasing metaphor for life and its myriad forms. Individual lives do not exist in isolation. No matter what animal or plant you can think of in nature, it does not exist without interacting with other animals and plants around it. Together, all the various plants and animals combine in almost unimaginable complexity to co-create whole eco-systems.

Each eco-system supports and sustains all the plants and animals within it. Each plant and animal supports and sustains the eco-system.

We humans are part of these complex eco-systems. We are not isolated beings. Without the eco-systems we are part of we could not exist. We are like one of the colours of the rainbow.

Try to imagine a rainbow without one of its colours. Suppose the colour blue was missing. It would no longer be a rainbow, would it?

Sadly, much of humanity is acting (metaphorically) as if one or more of the colours of the rainbow do not matter. Species (and even genera) of plants and animals are being made extinct as an insane rate.

My reflection continued on.

If light is passed through a prism the entire visible spectrum of colours appears on the other side of the prism. The unity of light (what we call white light) is refracted and dispersed by the prism, and we see the diversity of colour contained in that unity. Unity creates diversity.

Now place another prism after the first prism. But invert it. Now pass the white light through the first prism and then the colour spectrum through the second. What happens?

The colour spectrum is returned to white light. Diversity creates unity.

It is a metaphor worth reflecting upon often, because it can be very easy to forget that everything in the world is co-created by everything else. Nothing arises or exists completely on its own. Nothing is independent of other things, although it may be unique (i.e. it may be the unique colour red in our metaphor).

Next time you see a rainbow think and reflect upon the diversity of life and how that creates the wondrous unity that life is.