3 ms·

But, aren't red, green, and blue just the names we gave to those short, medium, and long wavelengths?

• jameshart 11y ago
  That's dangerous because it starts you down the road of thinking of colors as having a wavelength. A color is just the subjective sensation we get because of different balances of stimulation between our short, medium and long wave cones. Light of a specific frequency creates a specific color response, but it doesn't uniquely generate that response. The sensation of 'yellow' can be generated with light at a wavelength somewhere between medium and long, or light at both medium and long wavelengths with a gap between, or light with a broad spread of wavelengths from medium to long (just so long as there's not much short wave light in the mix). And there's no such thing as a 'purple' wavelength. You see purple when your long and short wavelength cones are stimulated, but the medium ones aren't, and that can't be accomplished with a single, narrow wavelength - only by a mixture of long and short wave light.
• Terr_ 11y ago
  Think of it this way: Wavelengths are to colors... as Chemicals are to Smells. Some [colors|smells] require multiple [wavelengths|chemicals], and sometimes two [colors|smells] that seem identical can actually be very different mixes of [wavelengths|chemicals]. Your computer monitor does not actually emit "a pure cornflower-blue wavelength", it exploits the limits of your vision and emits a mix of 2/3 wavelengths that simply seems the same. (Ditto for printer-ink.) To continue the analogy, it's like if the Smell-O-Vision company sold a prepackaged set of chemicals, which could be mixed-and-matched to approximate certain smells. They don't actually release the raw chemicals of "Apple Cider", but they instead release a mix which approximates it.