What is prism?

A prism is like a special kind of glass that makes light bend and split into colors, just like when you see rainbows in the sky or on water droplets.

Imagine you have a flashlight, and you shine it through a prism, which looks like a triangular block. The light goes in one side and comes out the other, but instead of staying white, it turns into a rainbow of colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Think of the prism as a kind of color filter that separates light into its parts. White light is actually made up of all these colors mixed together, but they’re hidden until the prism helps them come out.

When light goes through the prism, it bends, or refracts, because the glass slows it down just a little bit. Each color bends at a slightly different angle, so they spread apart and create a rainbow on a wall or paper behind the prism.

It’s like when you look at a spoon in a glass of water, the spoon seems bent because light changes direction as it moves from air to water. A prism does something similar but with all the colors of the rainbow!