Humans Are Blind to 99.997% of Electromagnetic Radiation
The visible spectrum is beautiful, but it’s only a tiny fraction of the whole story
When was the last time you saw a rainbow? Perhaps you were spellbound, if only for a couple of seconds, by the beauty and majesty of the vivid colours arching across the horizon.
In late summer of 2020, as I started to dread the change of seasons and the return of Covid, some unsettled weather brought about one of the most intense and luminescent rainbows I have ever seen — it definitely lifted my mood.
I think rainbows are one of the most beautiful displays of the natural world — each colour in the visible light spectrum is boldly painted across a grey sky. As someone who is partially sighted, it makes me so thankful for the array of colours that I can recognise and appreciate.
But, as I often point out when I’m teaching this topic, the human eye can only detect 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum. We term the tiny fraction that humans can see as ‘visible light’ and carry on with our lives, largely oblivious to the huge spectrum of electromagnetic waves present all around us.
