White Sands Light
White light refracted by the White Sands shatters into the full spectrum of visible color.
Aristotle believed that all color was derived from black and white, light and darkness. In 1666 Sir Isaac Newton purchased his first prism and began a series of experiments culminating in the crucial observation that white light was composed of all colors. He passed a beam of light through the first prism resulting in a continuous rainbow of hues, and then a second prism remixed these disparate rays back to a uniform white. Newton then chose the mystical number seven for his polychromatic vision – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
And when we see the arc of colors appearing in the heavens as sunbeams are split by raindrops – our hearts skip a beat, we stop to gaze and wonder, perhaps dream of love and magic, or chuckle about a pot of gold at the end of the world. So the spectrum of color deeply affects us.
In White Sands National Monument, Alamogordo, New Mexico, we experienced the profound impact of light and color on human emotion and the psyche. “Colour are light’s suffering and joy,” declaimed Goethe.
