Colors! We see them every day. We accept them.
Do they exist?
Thanks to our eyes and brains, we can never really "see" the real world. We can only see what our brains perceive. So can we be sure colors exist? The only way we know colors exist is because we see them, and our eyes do nothing but relay information into our brain. However, they can't be detected by anything else, except by recognizable wavelengths (or can they? Comment!)
Is the green grass green in reality? And if colors don't exist, is it randomness or shade that got them to evolve or develop that way?
How many are there?
One thing we've tried to do with colors is to break them up into components, for easier labeling. That's based on perception, though. It also doesn't work sometimes. So, In the purest form, colors are based on a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Even though colors only describe a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, there might still be an infinite amount of colors we can detect.
Wavelengths are numbers, real numbers, and the set where we see colors is just a subset of the real numbers. No matter which two numbers of wavelength you pick, no matter how close the two numbers are to each other, there will always be some number in between. So, technically, we should be able to see an infinite number of colors! Provably uncountable, even.
But that's only a hypothetical guess based on mathematics. How far can we actually detect? There's probably a point where most people stop telling the difference, even if what they see should actually be a different color.
And what if we evolve to see a new, different type of color? Would it "shove over" the other colors in the spectrum of visible light, or be detectable between two different wavelengths which we currently can't differentiate from? Is the latter even possible? Is there any way to describe what it would look like? Is there any way to describe what the current colors we see even look like? If someone described a new color to us which we couldn't see before, could we learn to see that color?
Arggh.
What are your thoughts on colors? Any interesting studies? Tell us.
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You know, evolving to see new colors would be a great element in a science fiction book. Maybe we evolve to see new colors of, say, radioactive materials in order to survive. Have fun trying to explain that.
ReplyDeleteIn a way, we already do see new colors. Red, green, and blue are the primary colors of light; yellow is red plus green, and cyan is green plus blue, and they all appear on the spectrum. But magenta is red plus blue, yet it isn't on the spectrum -- beyond red and blue there's just infrared and ultraviolet. Our brains turn the visible spectrum into a "circle," with magenta joining the ends. This is why you can't have a magenta laser; a laser has to be coherent, and there's no single frequency/wavelength to assign to magenta.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't just perception that controls our ability to see colors, but language. In other words, it's a software problem, not a hardware problem:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080407201846.htm
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