this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
87 points (93.1% liked)
science
14899 readers
416 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
<--- rules currently under construction, see current pinned post.
2024-11-11
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Naah.. Its just confusing spectra with perception.. We may only perceive 72% of the spectra.. But the rainbow it self has all the colors..
No it does not. The rainbow has all wavelength within the visible spectrum. But not all colors. And yes, color is based on perception.
Yoy can filter out frequencies in the rainbow spectra in a way that it looks like any color..
You can do that with white light, but not in the rainbow, because the wavelengths are spatially already separated. So you would also have to combine them again.
True it is...
Our eye perceives color as a mix of red, green, blue. The lowest color of the rainbow is red (hue 0 degrees on a color wheel) but our red cones have another sensitivity just above blue, so the rainbow shows as violet (hue 270 degrees) when both blue and red cones are triggered. But here, blue is triggered more than red. Then the rainbow extends into the ultraviolet which doesn't trigger any of our receptors. But the color wheel still has another 90 degrees or so of hue where red gets stronger and blue is weaker. These are not pure spectral colors, because they must activate both red and blue cones at different frequencies, not just a single frequency like violet does.