But most real colors are combinations of wavelengths e.g., magenta is a combination of red and blue rather than a monochromatic color. Michael Your count is true for what could be called pure colors (i.e., monochromatic light). It's the avian rough equivalent to "Hold my beer and watch this." The males have to demonstrate health and fitness to the females, and brightly colored displays (of which the peacock is an extreme example) is one of the ways they do it, even at the cost of making the males more conspicuous to predators. J Stackpole I don't know if there is a difference in sensitivity, but the brighter colorings of male birds compared to females of the same species has a different cause: the need to attract mates. Different encoding methods for the colour information are (soon probably to be "were") used around the word, but the american NTSC system was so imprecise at reproducing colour that NTSC was jokingly referred to in Europe as being an abbreviation for "Never Twice the Same Colour" Without this colour TV might have taken much longer to become established. without degrading the black and white one. This is why it was possible to squeeze some low bandwidth colour information into the unused frequencies in a standard black and white transmitted TV signal and produce an acceptable colour image. The rods provide the high resolution black and white image, the cones a low resolution colour one. Cones need higher levels of incident energy to operate so are useless in low light, but both cones and rods are present across the visual field. Whilst agreeing with chelle this is not completely true, I don't think he/she is completely correct either. “While the rods cannot discern color at all, they are sensitive to as little light as a single photon, hence they are most useful under extremely low-light conditions.“ I almost want to create the color figgity-floppity-floop just to expand humanity's grasp on the universe a bit more :) At the same time, my brain hurts worse knowing that simply the word "blue" has forever shaped my notion of color and there is no going back. (Specifics on the Horizion show might be a bit off, it's been quite some time since I watched it but the basics are there).īack to my original comment, it makes my brain hurt trying to differentiate colors that our species cannot physicaly perceive. There were colors that were effectively oppisites to us that they had no idea were even different. On the other hand, the tribe person's language only accounted for 5 overall colors, with an emphasis on blue-green. They showed the colors on screen and I couldn't tell a difference. The western person could name all of the colors that we know but fell short of the tribe person's clarity on the blue-green spectrum. If the society had a name for the color, it was then distinguishable to the person. Surprisingly, they found an association to language that completely caught me off guard. Even then he admits he was somewhat pushing her to guess the color blue.įor a british equivalent here is Stephen Fry talking about the ancient greek color "blue" on QI: Ģ) There was a BBC Horizon maybe 6 months ago on color where they compared a western person's perception of color to an indiginous tribe person's perception of color. As intrinsic as we find it she had the hardest time associating a color to the sky until she turned about 3-4 (don't remember exactly). One professor eventually made an experiment with his daughter to never equate the daytime sky with the color blue. I only caught the end of the show refering to the ancient greek notion of a "blue sky" (which practically didn't exist). Two other color related stories well worth mentioning.ĭid a show about 2 weeks ago that was a lot of fun. On the other hand, your eyes are very much made up of neutral molecules that are highly restricted with respect to the wavelengths of light they can respond to. While this number isn't infinite, it means you'd have to go to a sub- Planckian precision to discern a frequency difference between two photons that were very close in energy. For the Sun at just under 6000 K, with some regions slightly hotter and others slightly cooler, it emits about 40% of its energy in the form of photons that fall in the part of the light spectrum visible to our eyes. And oh, are there a lot of them: somewhere on the order of 10 45 visible-light photons come from the Sun every second. Instead, they can emit at an arbitrarily large number of frequencies, dependent on the temperature of the plasma. The Sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma, and the rules that govern atoms and the specific wavelengths that they can emit and absorb light at do not apply to plasmas. Image credit: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
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