The Atheist Blogger

A few days ago I mentioned how wrong Ray Comfort was when he remarked:

Light is invisible. We can’t see it.

I’ve checked back to Ray’s blog regularly to see what he does about this basic misunderstanding of physics and how the eye works, and to check up on the comments that his post got (almost all of them were mocking him). He appears to have now edited the article so it reads:

The essence of “white” light is invisible. We can’t see it. Despite this, science has taught us that it’s actually made up of seven beautiful colors that are undetectable to the human eye until they are refracted through a prism. Of course, we know that the seven colors are the amazing colors we see in a rainbow–red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

Nice bit of rewording he has done. Unfortunately it makes even less sense now than it did before his edits. What exactly is the “essence” of white light? Is he talking about the spectrum? That’s not invisible either. In fact that’s exactly how we see colours.

Take a red book and look at it. The “white” light from the source (Sun or lightbulb) hits the book, and all the colours in that spectrum are absorbed, whilst only red is reflected. The red light goes into our eye and we see the book as red. So no, the “essence” of white light is perfectly visible, and you’d be stuck in the dark without it (literally).

This explantion also debunks his next point in which he claims that the spectrum is only visible through a prism. The light was visible before it went into the prism, and the only reason we now see all the colours separately instead as one beam of white light is that the light gets slowed down in the prism. Light towards the violet end of the spectrum travels faster and get’s refracted more, whilst light towards the red end of the spectrum travels slower and get’s refracted less.

Ray is also mistaken in his childish view that white light is made up of 7 colours, when in fact it is made up of countless billions, all slightly different from its neighbours in the spectrum. The human eye separates these colours out into groups that are similar, which just happens to be 7, although depending on light conditions you can see many more or less.

So nice try Ray, but you have failed at science yet again. Leave it up to the educated next time, or if you really insist on writing more, do a bit of research…