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It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore bori

It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring. The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.

hellbanner 12y ago
Someone told me red is shorter so we see it faster -- is there any biological evidence for this?
- ertdfgcb 12y ago
  I don't think so, red has a smaller wavelength than the other colors we see, but I don't think that could translate into us seeing it faster (whatever that even means). It's pretty rare to see red in nature that isn't blood or fire, and when you do it's often on dangerous things (like those frogs in the amazon). Maybe red is so striking to us because red things in nature are things we need to pay attention to?
  - semaphoreP 12y ago
    Red actually has a larger wavelength. Red is at ~600 nm, while green and blue are at ~500nm and ~400nm respectively. Red has a lower frequency though.
- soroushjp 12y ago
  Not sure about the biology, but there is some evidence from physics for this. The speed of light is constant in a vacuum, but different for different wavelengths in a medium. This is why shining white light through a glass prism causes it to disperse into many colors -- they each travel through the medium at slightly different speeds. Interestingly, the refractive index (how much the light slows down in a medium) is higher for larger wavelengths like red in the color spectrum. So technically, red light travels slower than blue or green light in a medium (eg. air, water etc.). Of course I would delays in this would be absolutely tiny compared to delays due to neural processing .... but hey who knows, maybe we can tell the difference!
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
Shouldn't it be boring kind of by definition? I mean the whole concept of "boring" comes from describing something that is mundane, accessible and ubiquitous. If it is statistically most common, then it is the most prevalent and thus not novel whatsoever and therefore boring. This tells us one of two things: 1. We should be excited that we understand the universe so well that we have determined the most common thing and we represent that so often 2. More likely this is anthropomorphizing the universe around the narrow receptors of visible light
nichtich 12y ago
It's boring because it's not a "pure" color, as it must be a mix of different wavelengths that is weighted similar to what get to the surface of earth from sun. So it's boring in the same sense a white noise is boring -- it has little information. On the other hand, a more pure color means there must be something that is changing the sun's light as it reflects it, or it's emitting light of some specific wavelength, which has more information. Or put it simply, it's the color of dirt, and dirt is boring.
bladedtoys 12y ago
The vast majority of mammals have only black and white vision, quite likely because all the common ancestors the survived the K-T event (the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs) were nocturnal. Some groups such as fructivore primates have since re-evolved color vision to recognize ripe fruit from unripe. Thus not only our ability to see "pretty" colors but our probable instinctive liking of them as "pretty". Also, color is more complicated than simple wave length. Human perception and wavelength correspond fairly well most of the time. But we actually have three different cells for detecting color (rather than say two: one for high frequency one for low). The result is we can perceive a color like purple where in fact there is no one wavelength but a blending of two wavelengths. Pedantically by the way, red is a relatively low wave length.
- soroushjp 12y ago
  Tiny fix: Red is high wavelength within the color spectrum. It has a low frequency, if that's what you mean.
- vraid 12y ago
  That most mammals are color blind is nothing more than a myth. A few select are, like the marine mammals, but the vast majority are dichromats with red/blue color receptors. The last common ancestor was in fact a trichromat, having one red and two different blue receptors. When mammals diverged further, monotremes lost one of the blue receptors while other mammals lost the other. What did reevolve in groups such as marsupials and apes was the green color receptor, which was present in older ancestors, but had been lost in the first mammals. source: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/1531/2957.full.pdf http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/15...
fit2rule 12y ago
Maybe we perceive it as being boring because it is the average color of the universe?

hellbanner 12y ago

Someone told me red is shorter so we see it faster -- is there any biological evidence for this?

ertdfgcb 12y ago
I don't think so, red has a smaller wavelength than the other colors we see, but I don't think that could translate into us seeing it faster (whatever that even means). It's pretty rare to see red in nature that isn't blood or fire, and when you do it's often on dangerous things (like those frogs in the amazon). Maybe red is so striking to us because red things in nature are things we need to pay attention to?
- semaphoreP 12y ago
  Red actually has a larger wavelength. Red is at ~600 nm, while green and blue are at ~500nm and ~400nm respectively. Red has a lower frequency though.
soroushjp 12y ago
Not sure about the biology, but there is some evidence from physics for this. The speed of light is constant in a vacuum, but different for different wavelengths in a medium. This is why shining white light through a glass prism causes it to disperse into many colors -- they each travel through the medium at slightly different speeds. Interestingly, the refractive index (how much the light slows down in a medium) is higher for larger wavelengths like red in the color spectrum. So technically, red light travels slower than blue or green light in a medium (eg. air, water etc.). Of course I would delays in this would be absolutely tiny compared to delays due to neural processing .... but hey who knows, maybe we can tell the difference!

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

Shouldn't it be boring kind of by definition? I mean the whole concept of "boring" comes from describing something that is mundane, accessible and ubiquitous. If it is statistically most common, then it is the most prevalent and thus not novel whatsoever and therefore boring. This tells us one of two things: 1. We should be excited that we understand the universe so well that we have determined the most common thing and we represent that so often 2. More likely this is anthropomorphizing the universe around the narrow receptors of visible light

nichtich 12y ago

It's boring because it's not a "pure" color, as it must be a mix of different wavelengths that is weighted similar to what get to the surface of earth from sun. So it's boring in the same sense a white noise is boring -- it has little information. On the other hand, a more pure color means there must be something that is changing the sun's light as it reflects it, or it's emitting light of some specific wavelength, which has more information. Or put it simply, it's the color of dirt, and dirt is boring.

bladedtoys 12y ago

The vast majority of mammals have only black and white vision, quite likely because all the common ancestors the survived the K-T event (the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs) were nocturnal. Some groups such as fructivore primates have since re-evolved color vision to recognize ripe fruit from unripe. Thus not only our ability to see "pretty" colors but our probable instinctive liking of them as "pretty". Also, color is more complicated than simple wave length. Human perception and wavelength correspond fairly well most of the time. But we actually have three different cells for detecting color (rather than say two: one for high frequency one for low). The result is we can perceive a color like purple where in fact there is no one wavelength but a blending of two wavelengths. Pedantically by the way, red is a relatively low wave length.

soroushjp 12y ago
Tiny fix: Red is high wavelength within the color spectrum. It has a low frequency, if that's what you mean.
vraid 12y ago
That most mammals are color blind is nothing more than a myth. A few select are, like the marine mammals, but the vast majority are dichromats with red/blue color receptors. The last common ancestor was in fact a trichromat, having one red and two different blue receptors. When mammals diverged further, monotremes lost one of the blue receptors while other mammals lost the other. What did reevolve in groups such as marsupials and apes was the green color receptor, which was present in older ancestors, but had been lost in the first mammals. source: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/1531/2957.full.pdf http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/15...

fit2rule 12y ago

Maybe we perceive it as being boring because it is the average color of the universe?