Favicon

The Favicon for this website IsaacToh.com is the letter I. The font being used is Wide Latin. It contains animation with 7 frames at an interval of 0.1s each. Each of the frame is of different colours, and all the colours come from the rainbow, which is the seven colours of light. The Favicon with the letter ‘I’ flashing represent light consisting of seven colours, which together form the white light.

‘I’, a vowel, the ninth letter of the English alphabet stands for Isaac. It is also the symbol for the element iodine; the symbol for current (electricity) and also the symbol for the Roman numeral 1. Use as a pronoun, ‘I’ is the nominative singular pronoun, used by a speaker in referring to himself or herself. Looking at the favicon, Isaactoh.com is thus regarded as ‘I am Isaac Toh’.

Why Isaac Toh? This shall be dealt with later in the post about naming my baby during my pregnancy. As for now, just favicon. Since my favicon is about light/colour, lets have some ideas on light and colour.

Human beings rely particularly on light — sight is a very important sense. Our eyes and our brains use light coming in from all around us to build up a picture of the outside world. Eighty percent of the information received by seeing people reaches the brain through the eyes. Our eyes are not only sensitive to changes in brightness but also to the different colours in the light that reaches them. If our eyes could only sense brightness, we would see in black and white, like an old television programme or film. Colour gives us valuable extra information which helps us to understand the world in which we live.

Colour and light are closely related. The use of colour is very important in science. It helps scientists to understand what they are seeing.

Light is a kind of energy. It travels through the air and through space in the form of tiny waves that are far too small to see. Light is very important to us and is impossible to imagine life without it. In fact, without light from the sun there would be no life on Earth (because plants rely on light to make food).

We often say that light which comes from the sun or a light bulb looks white. We call it white light. However, white light is not a single colour but a mixture of lots of different colours, called a spectrum. You can see a spectrum when you look at a rainbow. There are seven colours in a spectrum. They are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. The colours which we can see are known as the visible spectrum. Beyond the red end of the spectrum is infra-red and beyond the violet end is ultra-violet. Infra means ‘below’ in the Latin language and ultra means above.

White light can be split into a spectrum by using a prism. A prism is a five-sided block of glass in which three of the faces form the shape of a triangle. When a beam of white light strikes one of the sides of the triangle at an angle, the light is bent (refracted). All the colours in the light are refracted, but different colours are bent by different amounts, because each has a different wavelength. Red light will bend(refract) the most and blue the least. Bending the light in this way is called refraction. Refraction causes the different colours of the spectrum to be separated. We can see each colour as it separates. This results in the colours separating and spreading out to form a band of rainbow colours known as a spectrum.

The experiment with the glass prism was first carried out by Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in 1666. Isaac Newton is an English scientist. He bought a prism at a fair. He put it in a dark room, made a small hole in the blind across his window and allowed a beam of sunlight to pass through it. He then placed a prism in the path of the light so that when the light shone through the prism, the colours separated out into a spectrum. He then passed the spectrum through a second prism, which bent the coloured light back again into a beam of white light. With this experiment, Isaac Newton proved that white light is made of different colours. He published these discoveries in his book, Opticks in 1704.

A rainbow is formed when raindrops in the air bend rays of light from the sun. The sunlight passes through the raindrops and is split into the seven colours, so we see a spectrum.

What we see as colour is called colour perception. It is important to understand that the colour of any object that we see comes from the colour of the light which bounces back, or is reflected from it. So, if you shine a white light onto a piece of cloth which absorbs all colours of light except red, then the cloth appears red. The red light which is left from the white light bounces back and gets scattered.