• Question: Why is light made up of 3 colours: Green, Red and Blue?

    Asked by msha2202 to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 12 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Hi msha2202!
      White light is actually made up of every different colour. If you shine a light through a prism, you can see a rainbow of colours shining out of it as the white light is split up. I think if you mix green, red and blue light, you get white, but most white lights are made up of all of the other colours too. I don’t think there is an answer for why it is made up of multiple colours, sorry. The different colours are slightly different versions of light that we can see and normally they are mixed together.
      I think this is an accurate answer, but I am not a physicist, so I don’t know a lot about it!

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      Hi msha2202

      I’m no physicist (ask my physical chemistry teacher) but light is made up of every colour you can see, including green, red and blue. This is why you see a rainbow, the sunlight shines through the water droplets and gets split into all the colours that make up light. I think televisions and computer screens use red, green and blue to make the image as these are the three primary colours and can be mixed to make all the colours you need. This article should give a bit more information than I can http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model .

      I hope that helps!

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