like as a physical property. i don’t know any color-ology maybe there’s a simple way to make me get it but
IT SEEMS like color depends entirely on BRIGHTNESS so an OBJECT can’t have a fixed COLOR because BRIGHTNESS changes all the time!
We only perceive color the way we do because our eyes have evolved to pick up certain wavelengths
Color is not a constant even amongst humans, even excluding cultural and linguistic differences, you got various forms of color-blindness
It’s just one of those things where thinking about it starts to be really trippy after a while
okay so wavelengths are a thing… but are they consistent & measurable?
i.e. is a red bucket always emitting the same flavor wave? what kind of wave is brighter than others (or is it the number)
Yea I believe there’s a general band of frequencies that generally is described as red or whatever other color, as generally perceived by the human. (Bc ofc some of it can be cultural or subjective or even change depending on color blindness or other conditions)
You can find charts describing the ranges, eventually the visual range gives way to ultraviolet and so on.
There are ranges that we aren’t able to perceive but birds are.
If only we could see microwaves, we’d finally be able to catch the culprit behind Havanna syndrome
So, if you’re going from a pure “this is what we’ve measured” science standpoint, the visible spectrum begins past infrared where the wavelengths are too long for us to pick up
As they tighten up, we get the standard ROY G BIV stuff you probably got taught until they tighten up so much we can’t pick them up either, ending with ultraviolet
Everything there has a set of wavelengths that we pick up and perceive as those colors, it’s the human visual spectrum
But that’s only because our eyes evolved to pick those up
Other living things perceive that exact same spectrum wildly differently because their eyes evolved differently for them
It’s one of those things that I love because it keeps me up at night
it’s the wavelength of the photons that bounce off the surface of a thing, after some wavelengths have been absorbed. so like, green things aren’t ‘green’, the stuff they are made of reflects green. so no, ‘colour’ is not a physical property, but an emergent one on how light and matter interact which is dependant on a lot of things like brightness and the medium the light travels through and all sorts. and even then, the actual colour spectrum you and I see is entirely constructed by our brains and specifically how the human brain compiles that sensory information as something you and I understand
if there is a spectrum of color we can’t see, is it real?
This :crab-party: got not only like human eyes 3-4 different receptors in their eyes to then get what colours are, but 12!
Of those 4 are in the UV spectrum, so they can see stuff that is invisible to us.
Basically the small part of physical reception in the eye is simplified that we got some “hills” in our eyes (typically named cones), in which there is a chamber that contains a molecule which can react when a photon gets absorbed by some active part of it. This leads over some steps to electrical signals via Neurons and via optical nerve to the brain and such.
After one of those molecules is activated (it is basically like a bucket of water over a door that falls when the door is opened - or the photon gets absorbed) the molecule needs some help and some time to get back into its previous state.
We got a high count of those receptors in our eyes in different places. This is part of what enables us to see intensity of light. The receptors differ in as much as they can absorb photons of different wavelengths.
There are also Rod cells which work to the same principle in general, but many of those are behind each other and give their signal combined into one way before it is passed on, this enables more colorless seeing with low light outside (e.g. in the night where you can’t really see colours).
The problem with that question is that “color” is multiple distinct things, some of which are physical or have discrete properties and others of which are entirely subjective or cultural. Like the actual color of an object, as in how it absorbs, refracts, and reflects light is a physical property of its surface and material. The color of light is a physical property of its wavelength, which can be altered by the medium it’s passing through. Your personal perception of color is internal and subjective. The concept of general blocks of color with names is entirely cultural.
