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As I understand it, the cone cells in your retina responsible for "red" have a second peak on the violet-side of blue. This means that a violet wavelength will
by jbay808 5y ago
As I understand it, the cone cells in your retina responsible for "red" have a second peak on the violet-side of blue. This means that a violet wavelength will get efficiently absorbed by both the "blue" and "red" receptors but not the "green" receptors.
That sort of creates a "periodic boundary condition" to colour perception, wrapping a monotonic wavelength spectrum into a colour wheel.
- thanatos519 5y agoThis is also my understanding. The lowest visible frequency is close to half of the highest visible frequency so there might be some harmonics at work in this mechanism. When I set my LED lights to RGB(0.1,0,1), it looks very much like my blacklights (UV LED, or 405nm lasers. and maybe I should get a tube to compare). I can tell them apart because the physical offset of the R and B LEDs makes a bit of visible fringing, or maybe it's that the single violet photons are coherent (with themselves) whereas the red and blue photons are not, or maybe the retina is a subtler instrument than its simple physical description suggests.