Why are soap bubbles so colorful?
The colors of a soap bubble come from white light, which contains all the colors of the rainbow. When white light reflects from a soap film, some of the colors get brighter, and others disappear. You can think of light as being made up of waves—like the waves in the ocean. When scientists talk about waves, they often talk about a wave’s frequency. Frequency is the number of times that a wave vibrates in a second. For ocean waves, frequency measures the number of times a passing wave makes a surfer bob up and down in a second. For light waves, frequency measures how many electromagnetic vibrations happen in a second. The frequency of a light wave determines which color light you see. Violet light, for instance, is the highest frequency light that you can see; it vibrates 723,000 times in a billionth of a second. White light is made up of light waves of many different frequencies. Two waves can be in the same place at the same time. Suppose two ocean waves of equal size meet. Each wave p
