ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Dispersion (chemistry)

Dispersion is like when you drop a spoonful of sugar into a glass of water and watch it disappear. The sugar molecules break up and spread out evenly through the water. This happens because the water molecules are constantly moving and bumping into the sugar molecules, causing them to spread out.

In chemistry, dispersion is when tiny particles of one substance are spread throughout another substance. These tiny particles are called colloids. For example, milk is a dispersion of fat droplets in water. When you shake up salad dressing, you're creating a dispersion of oil and vinegar droplets.

Dispersion can also refer to the way light is separated into its different colors. If you shine a beam of white light through a prism, the light is dispersed and you can see all the colors of the rainbow. This happens because the different colors of light have slightly different wavelengths, and these wavelengths bend differently as they pass through the prism.