5 ms·
Totally tangential to the main point, but is no-one going to comment on the fact that the colour spectrum actually does in fact go from less-something to more-s
by epgui 5y ago
Totally tangential to the main point, but is no-one going to comment on the fact that the colour spectrum actually does in fact go from less-something to more-something? It's a spectrum of light frequency.
The colour labels, like "blue" or "red" are a psycho-cultural construct that are in large part shaped by the cone receptors in our eyes, but it's still a spectrum of light frequency.
- orlp 5y agoTell me, where does magenta lie on this proposed light frequency spectrum? What about black, or white? Brown? Is the dress black and blue or white and gold? There's much more to colour perception than just light frequency + psycho-cultural constructs.
- danuker 5y agoEven the color spectrum depicted in the article misses magenta, due to it being a color made of two frequencies, not just one.
- epgui 5y agoMagenta, black, white and brown are all completely explainable with the light spectrum, photoreceptors and psychocultural constructs. Nobody ever claimed that every possible colour perception needed to correspond to a single wavelength. Rather, every possible colour can be constructed from a combination of wavelengths.
- alanbernstein 5y agoThe color spectrum is an apt comparison. Yes, a single pure hue lies on a simple one dimensional wavelength scale. But a color sensed by your eyes is the result of different intensities on three different receptor types, making the perceptual space more or less three dimensional. The color emitted by an object is even more complicated, with an intensity for each visible wavelength (to a first order approximation). Maybe the comparison should have been more explicit about how the one dimensional color spectrum is a drastically simplified representation of color physics, even though it already includes qualitatively distinct colors on a simple scale. On the other hand, while color has a lot of nuance to it, the total light energy emitted from a source might be a much simpler, totally scalar way to characterize light sources. If you squint hard, you can think of the autism spectrum concept as closer to intensity than to color.
- robobro 5y agoGoethe vs Newton all over again!
- thanatos519 5y agoIt goes from less-something to more-something as frequency but more-something to less-something as wavelength. "colour" is a mix of power at each frequency, and everyone has different retinas, different optical cortices, and different cultural contexts. That this causes them such confusion makes it difficult for me to empathize with muggles. "Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity." -- Herman Melville, Billy Budd What I love about this quote is that violet and orange are so far apart in the rainbow.