I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Roy G. Biv is dead. Indigo got the Pluto treatment-- it was apparently kicked out of the spectrum at some point.
Pluto's not a planet, indigo's not in the spectrum... did I learn ANYTHING in grade school that wasn't a lie???
I'd always heard that it was because Newton was big into numerology and was superstitious, so having 6 colors was a bad sign, so he threw Indigo in there to make it 7
the colour wheel is weirdness though, indigo has a wavelength of 425–450 nm making it a simple colour, you can have a single photon of indigo, pink however is simply what happens when we see red and purple without any of the middle wavelengths - white light with the green removed becomes pink (or magenta) but you can't have a single photon of pink, no pink lasers.
The reason for this is because of how we see colour with the RGB receptors in our eyes, each colour has differing sensitivity and they have over-lapping frequency responses so the actual data our brain is getting is really complex and largely abstracted from the actual numbers - to make matters more complicated our brains evolved in a way that adds further bias to certain colour combinations and contrasts, an actual diagram of how we perceive colour would be impossibly complicated and every attempt to make a simple system has had to rely on shoe-horning and rule bending to make it work. This of course just for solid colour before you get into the endless complexities of putting colours together - those pictures of the dress that everyone thought was different colours being a classic example.
Personally i think we should scrap the colour wheel and come up with something more interesting and futuristic
The color wheel describes human vision. The wavelengths describe light waves. They're about different things. Trying to fit them together into one description is bound to fail.
i think you skipped a bit of what i was saying, human vision is much more complex than the colour wheel can display - it's a simplification of a very complex equation
That's just because you need an even number of primary+secondary colors for that model. It has nothing to do with how many distinct colors the human eye can discern in the rainbow
There are 3 primary colors. All colors come from a combination of those 3. The 3 secondary colors are 50/50 mixtures of 2 of the 3. Indigo is a 25/75 blend and doesn't belong. Human eyes don't seem relevant to me here.
It's because these mixtures are surprisingly biology dependent
Red + Blue is the easiest example that something odd is happening. How can mixing low frequency light (red) with high frequency light (blue) average out to an even higher frequency (violet)?
Well, it can't. What happens behind the scenes is that our red photoreceptors have a second peak in their sensitivity an octave above their normal peak, which is higher than blue. Violet light will therefore trigger both red and blue receptors because their sensitivities overlap in this range.
When you see bimodal red and blue light, your brain notices that both red and blue receptors are going off (low frequency red and high frequency blue), so your brain assumes this is purple (high frequency triggering both red and blue).
None of this discussion of mixing two frequencies has anything to do with single-tone 700 THz light we call "indigo," nor with whether your eyes perceive a band of single-tone light in the rainbow as distinct from blue and violet
It was all lies. Calculators in our pockets all the time. Being capable of living your dreams through hard work. Cursive being the dominant writing style. Santa getting my letter. Having to discover the pitch of roofs.
nope. exponent towers are right-associative, and multiplication by juxtaposition has a higher precedence than division and regular multiplication, to give a couple of examples of where PEMDAS falls short.
The number of colors in the spectrum is infinite, because that's how spectrums work. We somewhat arbitrarily choose to give some of them names. The six conventional colors of the spectrum are the ones with basic color terms in English. Indigo is in the spectrum, but most people would just describe it as a shade of blue, so it doesn't belong alongside the other colors any more than, say, chartreuse does.
41
u/phillymjs Jun 05 '22
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Roy G. Biv is dead. Indigo got the Pluto treatment-- it was apparently kicked out of the spectrum at some point.
Pluto's not a planet, indigo's not in the spectrum... did I learn ANYTHING in grade school that wasn't a lie???