we're just gonna be talkin' about rainbows

and, basically, what I'm gonna do is...

Let me just show you.

Whoo.

Rainbows, it's rainbows.

(smooth music)

Because who doesn't like rainbows?

Rainbows are commonly known as the symbol

of hope, peace, pride, the LGBTQ flag.

It's the symbol that God's

never gonna flood the earth again.

And there may be a pot of gold at the end of it.

So my entire goal for this video is to fill this whole room

up with rainbows, minus the gold coin.

I mean, that could be cool.

And we're gonna try to do three pretty simple experiments

to try to accomplish this.

But before we jump into our experiments,

I do want to understand

and try to learn how rainbows are made.

(keys tapping)

How are rainbows made?

So I want to share with you the things that I've learned

and please correct me if I'm ever wrong.

And I'll try my best to keep it simple.

When I'm talkin' about rainbows,

I'm talkin' about the whole range of colors

visible to the human eye.

And this rainbow is what we see after that rain,

like what we see in the sky.

Wow (muffled speaking).

Now sunlight, we perceive as white,

but it's actually the whole spectrum of colors combined.

Knowing this, how can we take all the colors

from the light and then spread 'em out, make a rainbow?

How does the rain do it?

Well, whenever light passes through a material

such as glass or water, like rain, refraction can occur,

meaning it changes direction and speed.

And that actually spreads the wavelength of light.

When you spread the wavelength of light,

you see all the visible colors,

like the spectrum, which is rainbow.

(light music)

I hope that all makes sense

and I just want to jump into our first experiment

'cause we're running out of light.

(tinkly crescendo)

So our first test, or experiment,

is gonna be with a prism.

(rhythmic techno music)

Let me show you my setup.

So I have, I'm just reflecting light off of this glass

so that it can go through this prism,

bounce off over here,

it's hard to see on the phone,

but it makes two rainbows right there.

Our prism's right there, hanging,

and it's actually sending rainbow all the way down here.

And just for funsies, for later,

here's a little snippet of what we're gonna be doin'.

Oh, wow!

Woo! Oh, yeah.

Here's another variant of the prism.

It's this thing.

And I believe these crystals work

just kinda like a prism

but it just makes a lot more rainbows, tinier ones.

Little fun fact, back in the day they thought prisms

would color light, kinda like a stained glass.

Isaac Newton actually proved this wrong.

So the experiment that he did,

let me see if I can recreate it.

I'm gonna go close up real quick.

Here's a little quick experiment to show you

that this is not staining the light.

You just let one single color to go through this slit.

And the idea is if you get another prism

and you put it on that color,

if it colors the light,

it should be a rainbow, right, but no.

Let's try a different color, let's try blue.

Blue green, that's kinda cool.

This shows that the prism is not coloring the light.

But we're gonna keep moving on and

let's go to our next experiment.

This looks cool.

(tinkly crescendo)

Our next experiment involves CDs, just need a CD.

You can already see the rainbows in it.

And hope I'm seeing some rainbow on the ceiling,

but you probably can't see that.

Where's my rainbow?

I'm seeing a little bit of rainbow,

I don't know if...

Oh wait, can you see that on camera right there?

Sort of similar to the prism,

the CD spreads the colors of the light.

And it's because of what's called grating diffraction.

Sort of simple terms, the CD has

these super micro gratings that are evenly spaced out

and when the sun hits it and bounces around,

it's able to spread these colors.

So if you bend it a little bit,

kind of combines all the color

and makes it more vivid.

Wonder if I can, like, break this into little pieces

and actually make a disco ball with it?

(CD pops) Oh!

(tinkly music)

(Mark laughing)

Won't break.

(hammer smacking) That's all I did to it.

(wrench smashes)

(sighs) Let's move on.

For our next fact, I want to quickly

talk about the colors of the rainbow, or ROYGBIV.

Why ROYGBIV?

And if you've never heard of it,

it's red, orange, yellow,

green, blue, indigo, violet?

I hope I got that right.

Whenever you see a rainbow, you'll notice

it's in this order of ROYGBIV, and why is that?

Basically it all comes down to wavelengths.

And all the colors that you're seeing

are the different wavelengths of that light,

from red having longer wavelengths,

meaning it has lower energy,

towards violet has higher energy, or shorter wavelengths.

And beyond that is something that our eyes can't see.

(light rhythmic music)

Makes me think about if you're colorblind,

how do you see rainbows?

Or if you are an animal that can see

a different range of spectrum, what's that world like?

I digress, I just think light is so fascinating

that something so simple that we see everyday

can get so complex.

Well, let's move on.

(tinkly crescendo)

So the sun has moved forward even more

and this works perfect for our third experiment,

which is my favorite.

We just need water.

(water splashing) Ah, no oh. (stammering)

So fill it up with water

and the only other thing that we need is a mirror.

The light bounces off the mirror

and the water actually refracts it,

so the water is the one that's slowing down the light

and spreads it out so we can have a rainbow.

There is actually a specific angle that works.

Ooh, oh oh oh, wait wait wait.

It's working.

Oh, there it is.

Let me show you what's going on.

Water, glass, you can actually see a little bit of rainbow

right there, reflecting all the way over there.

It looks, it looks dope.

I'm gonna touch this, sphew.

And then, boom.

It just comes to life

and they're just mesmerizing how they're moving.

The gradation is so smooth.

I love it, I love it.

(peaceful music)

(full chord)

With all this rainbow science,

what can we actually do with it,

besides appreciating its beauty?

Well, we could actually use this to study the universe,

which is amazing to me.

And it's achieved with something

called (stammering) spectroscopy.

It's where scientists use a device called spectroscope

and this device can capture light from space

and actually use the same idea

that we've been doing with our experiments,

splitting our light and spreading the spectrum.

And this rainbow spectrum actually

contains information that we can analyze and figure out

what elements this light has interacted with.

So basically, we're figuring out what's

out there in the universe by reading a rainbow.

Anyways, I basically want to use everything

that I've learned about rainbows to create them

and then paint my room, my apartment, with rainbows.

Hopefully it'll work, so we'll see.

(tinkly music)

So you can see if I'm dispersing that.

(upbeat music)

I'll just put some of the CDs.

It's very subtle, but it's there.

That's awesome.

I was this close to finishing it up.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time.

There's no more sunlight inside our room.

But there's always tomorrow,

so I'm gonna try again tomorrow.

I've been running around trying to set up this rainbow

'cause the light keeps shifting and it keeps changing

but I'm gonna quickly show you what I got.

All right, you ready for this?

(latch rattles)

(light rhythmic music)

Check that out, that's so cool.

So cool, like a party in here.

So I have the crystals that my partner,

Elizabeth, has and I combined them.

I have a couple of prisms.

I have some crazy contraption, I have all of these.

And look at that, the CDs, I actually think

it's such a great job with that rainbow.

Look at all that.

- All right.

- [Mark] What do you think?

- Whoa, it's a party in here.

Whoa, you can even like see it.

- [Mark] Oh, that's so cool.

(thoughtful music)

Look at your crystals.

- Whoa, look at the wall.

Woo, that's so cool.

- [Mark] I just wanted to see how far I could push it.

It's all fading slowly.

I mean, there's still some.

- Yeah, but it's kinda cool how it's constantly changing.

- Yeah. (tinkly music)

Overall, I thought it was pretty successful

and it was pretty amazing,

pretty magical, I'd say.

Obviously, the sun keeps moving, so every couple minutes,

that rainbow would shift and change

so I have to switch all the mirrors and the prisms.

It was a lot of work,

but the results were pretty amazing.

I learned so much from our experiments

and I hope that you did, too.

I just think that it's so cool with,

like, something so simple

we could create something beautiful.

Well, hopefully you liked the video

as much as I had fun making it

and that it inspires you

to bring a little bit of color in your space.

Peace. (quiet music)

(tinkly crescendo)

(gentle music)