What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?
In Gateshead, Carol Thorn of Bill Quay Bookshop, chose an elemental phenomena for her most beautiful sight - a complete, circular rainbow:
‘It was incredibly beautiful - like a coloured halo in the sky. Usually you only see an arc because the rest of the rainbow disappears beyond the horizon, but up in the hills where I used to live I was high enough to see the whole thing.
‘When I first saw it, I was like a child. I ran indoors and told my husband, “just come and look at this!” I hadn’t realised until then that rainbows were circles, but it explains why they never have an end. For me this realisation, far from spoiling the mystery, somehow made the whole thing even more beautiful.’
If you've always wondered how rainbows are formed, there is a simple explanation here including a description of the circumstances in which Carol's full rainbow can be observed. It also includes this simple diagram showing white light from the sun refracting as it passes into a water droplet before reflecting back against the back surface of the droplet to make it visible to the observer. Depending on the position of the observer, he or she will only see one colour emerging from any single droplet but as he or she glances up or down he or she will see bands of light emerging from millions of neighbouring droplets.
For a more detailed explanation about the formation of rainbows visit here which includes Descartes' experiment to understand what happened inside the water droplet.
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| René Descartes' sketch of how primary and secondary rainbows are formed (courtesy Wikipedia) |
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| Bella's Bubble - by Karen Hodgson and illustrated by Rebecca Griffiths |
To help promote our new title The King Who Wanted More, We're finding out what is the most beautiful thing people have ever seen. It could be a landscape, a painting, a building, or maybe something altogether different...it’s completely up to you. Please email [email protected] if you'd like to take part.
