Facts of Life

If light travels in straight lines, why are rainbows curved? Although light travels in straight lines, it gets refracted (bent) when it passes through water. Rainbows are curved because the sun's rays enter each raindrop and bounce off the mirror-like surface inside, reaching our eye at an angle of 42 degrees from the direction of the sun. The angle dictates that all of the rays lie on the arc of a circle, but we don't see the whole circle because the ground obscures the bottom of it.   There you learnt something new today !!