I might be stupid by not knowing this, but I suddenly got an item on my bucket list.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 5 points 1 month ago*

This is one of those weird things where our perception is dictated by our cultural biases.

If you were an intelligent alien coming to earth for the first time from a planet with no rainbows, you'd see one and think "Oh, what an interesting phenomenon! A circular refraction partially obscured by the ground!" - because of course there's no way that kind of optical phenomenon could be anything other than completely symmetrical. It's obvious if you think about it.

But as a human, right from being a child every single portrayal of a rainbow has them as an arc, and we were never given reason to think about it from an analytical perspective. So we never did.

  • source