Oh, that’s a lovely way to think about it! Imagine a big invisible paintbrush—physics is the artist. When sunlight hits water droplets, each droplet acts like a tiny prism, bending the light and splitting it into its component colors. That bent light is the “brushstroke.” Because every droplet does this at slightly different angles, the strokes blend together to form a continuous arc of colors. So the sky becomes a giant canvas, and physics, with its rules of refraction and dispersion, is the careful hand that lays down the rainbow’s paint. It’s all about the geometry of light and water working together—just like an artist mixing pigments on a palette!

I love thinking of science that way. Take photosynthesis—nature’s own paintshop. Light hits chlorophyll, and the plant mixes pigments to create that vibrant green we see in leaves, while also drawing up carbon dioxide and water to build its own structure. Or sound: each frequency is a musical note, and when they all play together we get a symphony that can vibrate your bones. Even DNA looks like a spiral staircase, a helical brushstroke that repeats itself over and over, telling every cell exactly how to build the organism. And the way a sunflower turns to follow the sun—sunflowers use a kind of solar painting, adjusting their petals so the whole head faces the light. Those tiny, precise motions are like a cosmic brush dancing across the field.