Unweavable Rainbow

June 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

The poet John Keats, referring to the work of Isaac Newton, wrote about the dangers of ‘unweaving the rainbow’ in which, through the developments of optics and the scientific understanding of light, the mysteries of the rainbow were revealed. This rational revelation Keats interpreted as an evacuating of the power and sublime beauty of the rainbow. The rainbow itself does not disappear under the gaze of science of course; a full and complete explanation of the mechanisms by which a rainbow is produced, or of how one is perceived, or even a complete neuron-by-neuron account of the cerebral processes which correlate with one’s consciousness of the rainbow, do not remove the rainbow from the sky.

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