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  • Book Review
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Somewhere over the rainbow

Nature volume 414, pages 488–489 (2001)Cite this article

The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth, and Science

  • Raymond L. Lee Jr &
  • Alistair B. Fraser
Pennsylvania State University Press: 2001. 408 pp. $65

The authors have, of course, the perfect subject for bringing together not only art and science but myth, nature and anthropology. And Lee and Fraser refuse to peddle the simplistic device that celebrates Newton's matter-of-fact 'unweaving' of the rainbow and then shows how artists persisted in getting the rainbow wrong. Rather, we see how both art and science are represented by a multitude of voices, making their interplay more rich and complex than is commonly portrayed. I would not have expected the poet Wordsworth to spring to Newton's defence, for example, but here he is: “The beauty in form of a plant or an animal is not made less but more apparent as a whole by more accurate insight into its constituent properties and powers.” The physicist Richard Feynman was unable to put it better over a century later.

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  1. Philip Ball is a consultant editor for Nature. His latest book, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, is published by Penguin.

    • Philip Ball
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Ball, P. Somewhere over the rainbow. Nature 414, 488–489 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35107121

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