How a Prism Separates White Light

Refraction and dispersion split light into spectral colors.

Canal
3Blue1Brown
Publicado
7 dic 2023
Vídeo
1:00
Lectura
1 min
Original
inglés
Abrir en YouTube
Al desplazarte, el vídeo se reduce a la esquina inferior derecha y sigue reproduciéndose. Los subtítulos siguen tu idioma de lectura.
Idioma de lecturaDisponible en 2 idiomas
Este artículo aún no está en español, así que se muestra el original en inglés.
RESUMEN

En 30 segundos

This short introduction explains how light changes direction in glass and why different frequencies separate in a prism.

  1. 1Light in glassLight travels more slowly in glass than in vacuum.
  2. 2RefractionA beam entering at an angle changes direction.
  3. 3DispersionDifferent frequencies bend differently and separate.

Conclusiones

  1. Light changes direction at an interface when it enters at an angle.
  2. Glass slows different frequencies by different amounts.
  3. White light contains components with different spectral colors.
TemasPhysics
TEXTO COMPLETO

Lee el texto editado por capítulos

Solo la transcripción
01

Refraction and dispersion

The speaker introduces how a prism separates white light.

The speaker starts with a common explanation of a prism: light travels more slowly in glass, and a beam entering the glass at an angle changes direction, a phenomenon called refraction.

White light can be represented as a mixture of different frequencies, corresponding to spectral colors. Glass affects their speeds differently, so they refract by different amounts and spread into a rainbow.

Más de este canal

20 diapositivas40:44EN
3Blue1Brown· 16 oct 2026Grant Sanderson: There's never been a better time to go into mathGrant Sanderson, Constantin Kogler · 3Blue1BrownStudents fear AI has solved mathematics. Grant Sanderson argues the opposite: even if machines prove theorems better than we do, the institution of math stays valuable—and this is a rare moment when newcomers can reshape it.MathematicsAI for scienceHuman-AI Collaboration+2
29 diapositivas51:55EN
3Blue1Brown· 18 sept 2026The last IMO problem AI could not solveGrant Sanderson · 3Blue1BrownGrant Sanderson walks through IMO 2025 Problem 6 — a tiling puzzle that frontier models missed — and the visual patience it takes to prove a construction is optimal.MathematicsAI researchReasoning & test-time compute+2
0:55EN
3Blue1Brown· 24 jul 2026The 64 Sugar Cubes Puzzle: Six Equal DistancesA 4×4×4 block has three colors; prove that six same-colored pairs share a distance.MathematicsEducation
33:51EN
3Blue1Brown· 16 jul 2026What Cross-Entropy Connects: Compression, Language Models and KL DivergenceGrant Sanderson · 3Blue1BrownGrant Sanderson builds cross-entropy from code lengths and uses it to explain next-token training and distillation.MathematicsMachine LearningFoundation Models+1
Diapositivas2:25EN
3Blue1Brown· 12 jun 2026How Shannon Measured the Entropy of EnglishA guessing game helped Claude Shannon estimate how much information English text contains, and why prediction is central to compression.MathematicsAI History
Diapositivas1:02EN
3Blue1Brown· 10 jun 2026A Robot Walk and the Puzzle of Optimal Binary EncodingHow few bits does it take to send directions that occur with unequal frequencies?MathematicsScience Communication