Apples Rainbows and Waves

Isaac Newton and the Apple

    It is one of the most famous anecdotes in the history of science. The young Isaac Newton is sitting in his garden, when an apple falls on his head and in a stroke of brilliant insight, he suddenly comes up with his theory of gravity. It was 1666, and the plague had closed many public buildings and places. Newton was obsessed by the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, and eventually reasoned that the influence of gravity must extend over vast distances. After seeing how apples always fall straight to the ground, he spent several years working on the mathematics showing that the force of gravity decreased as the inverse square of the distance.  His thoughts ?  There must be a drawing power in matter. And the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the Earth must be in the Earth's centre, not in any side of the Earth". Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly or towards the centre? If matter thus draws matter; it must be proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the Earth, as well as the Earth draws the apple. It also had a resonance with the Biblical account of the tree of knowledge, and Newton was known to have religious views.

 Apple Computer

      Founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple Computer on April 1 1976 and incorporated the company on January 3 1977 in Cupertino, California. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had been friends for some time, having met in 1971, through their mutual friend, Bill Fernandez. The Apple Lisa was a personal computer designed at Apple Computer, Inc. during the early 1980s. Officially, “Lisa” stood for “Local Integrated Software Architecture”, but it was also the name of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' daughter.Development of the Lisa began in 1978  and it underwent many changes during the development period before shipping at the very high price of US$9,995 with a 5 MB hard drive. 

Their First Logo 1977

Newtons Circle of Colour

      This circular diagram became the model for many color systems of the 18th and 19th centuries. Claude Boutet’s painter’s circle of 1708 was probably the first to be based on Newton’s circle.  Our modern understanding of light and color begins with Isaac Newton 1642-1726 and a series of experiments that he publishes in 1672. He is the first to understand the rainbow when he refracts white light with a prism, resolving it into its component colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. In the late 1660s, Newton starts experimenting with his ’celebrated phenomenon of colors.’ At the time, people thought that color was a mixture of light and darkness, and that prisms colored light. Newton set up a prism near his window, and projected a beautiful spectrum 22 feet onto the far wall. Further, to prove that the prism was not coloring the light, he refracted the light back together. Artists were fascinated by Newton’s clear demonstration that light alone was responsible for color. His most useful idea for artists was his conceptual arrangement of colors around the circumference of a circle , which allowed the painters’ primaries red, yellow, blue to be arranged opposite their complementary colors ,as a way of denoting that each complementary would enhance the other’s effect through optical contrast.

 Colours in White Light and Newtons Disc

Colours of the Rainbow -- All colours bounce off at 40 to 42 degrees. Unique frequencies, make up more colors in a rainbow than there are stars in the Universe or atoms in your body, but that goes far beyond what we can perceive. Your imperfect eye can probably only discern about a million distinct colors when you view a rainbow, or anything else, for that matter. It’s only light ranging from about 400 nanometers to a little over 700 nanometers that provides us with the light visible to our human eyes.

Rainbows 

Frequencies of Musical Notes

Sound Waves -- White noise, for example, contains all the audible frequencies, just like white light contains all the frequencies in the visible range. In musical sound waves, the frequencies are spaced at intervals that we find pleasing to the ear, creating a harmonic structure that gives a sound its unique tone quality, or timbre. The noises we hear every day, boots stomping across the floor, a car honking outside, the jingling of keys are made up of sporadic wave forms, a random distribution of frequency and amplitude. The other colors are similar to white noise, but with more energy concentrated at either the high or low end of the sound spectrum, which subtly changes the nature of the signal. Pink noise, for example, is like white noise with the bass cranked up. In recent years, pink noise has become the darling of the noise spectrum, dethroning white as the in-vogue option on sound generators for sleep or concentration.The pink noise pattern has been found in most genres of music.  If white is all frequencies at once, black is the color of silence.

What Color is a Mirror

Trivia

 Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon

Aubrey Powell -- He was born on 23 September 1946, co-founded the album cover design company Hipgnosis with Storm Thorgerson in 1967.The company ran successfully for 15 years until 1982. He was nominated for five Grammy Awards.

The story of where the album design came from by Aubrey Powell -- "I was looking through an old French book of early color photography from the 50s, and in this book was a photo of a prism on a piece of sheet music and sunlight coming in through the glass window. It was creating this rainbow effect. Storm said, “This is interesting. It sums up Pink Floyd. I’ve got it. We’ll do a triangle with a prism shape coming through it as a graphic, not as a photograph."

 When all the world is a hopeless jumble And the raindrops tumble all around Heaven opens a magic lane When all the clouds darken up the skyway There's a rainbow highway to be found Leading from your windowpane To a place behind the sun Just a step beyond the rain.