Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: thedoc on 16/04/2016 06:50:02
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Sheri Nicklaus asked the Naked Scientists:
In 1994, a RAINBOW was near to me, quite big ... The red colored Ray suddenly extended from the whole RAINBOW and it extended towards me and touched my heart. I felt a little charge or something like that but I was not hurt nor did it scare me. I have never told anyone and I don't care if no one believes me. I just wanted to know if this has ever happened before to anyone else or who would be interested in this. Thanks.
What do you think?
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A rainbow is nothing more than scattered light from the sun. When it rains and the sun shines simultaniously the raindrops act like a prism, refracting the light so that a spectrum appears in the sky. In other words, a rainbow is an optical illusion which cannot be physically touched nor approached. Even if you could touch it I don't think you would be able to feel it since it is just light.
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On one rare occasion I did find myself at the end of a rainbow surrounded by multicolored light for a few seconds , I looked aro0und for the "pot of gold" but found none
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Not everything which looks like a rainbow is a rainbow ...
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/rainbows/notabow.htm
It is possible to be surrounded by some of these rainbow look-alikes ...
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/globrock.htm
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It is possible to produce a very small rainbow, by creating a mist of water from a garden hose on a sunny day.
If you make the fan of water spray small enough (less than 1 meter across), it is possible to reach out and touch the rainbow (or at least the tiny water droplets where the rainbow originates).
But I don't see a way that a rainbow could reach out and touch you, in a physical sense.
In a metaphysical sense, anything is possible.
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Sheri Nicklaus asked the Naked Scientists:
In 1994, a RAINBOW was near to me, quite big ... The red colored Ray suddenly extended from the whole RAINBOW and it extended towards me and touched my heart. I felt a little charge or something like that but I was not hurt nor did it scare me. I have never told anyone and I don't care if no one believes me. I just wanted to know if this has ever happened before to anyone else or who would be interested in this. Thanks.
What do you think?
The reason that you won't find many believers of your account is not because people think that you're lying but because what you're describing is not a rainbow because what you're describing doesn't have the same properties of a rainbow.
The reason for this is because a rainbow doesn't have a location in space but is light scattered by light and the color that you see is light being scattered at different angles. If you try to move towards a rainbow the rainbow itself will appear to remain at the same distance from you so that you can never appear to get closer to one. This means that a rainbow is not a physical object and does not have a location in space. This being the case means that you can't be where a rainbow is. For details please see:
http://www.whyzz.com/why-can-t-i-touch-a-rainbow