FAVOURITE COLOUR IN A RAINBOW

[VCH]

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE COLOUR IN A RAINBOW?

[Ephesos]

Green is optimal.

[Swimmin' Salmon]

Yellow - for Pikachu. Put the mossy sphere on the correct altar.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Ephesos

Green is optimal.

QFT

Speaking of quantum field theory, here are some fun facts about light.
The human visual system radically compresses the totally mind-blowing bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum into just three numbers per eye cell, giving us our three primary colors. Blue plus yellow makes green is human biology, not physics. Red, green and blue are to light as sweet, salt, sour and bitter are to chemistry. If you can get hold of a red and a green laser pointer, shine them on top of each other on a white surface, and you'll see the spot where they overlap as yellow. It's not that mixing red and green light produces yellow light. It's that your eyes don't distinguish between yellow light, and a mixture of red light and green light.

(Mixing light is not the same as mixing paint, because what makes the color of paint is that the paint absorbs light of other colors, so for paint mixing you have to think in terms of what light is getting taken away, instead of what light is getting added. How it works out is a bit complicated, but the bottom line is that green is a primary color for light, and yellow for paint.)

Human eyes detect electromagnetic waves in a narrow range of frequencies, namely the ones that transmit well through Earth's atmosphere. Much lower or much higher frequencies also transmit well, which is why radio works, but those frequencies aren't generated naturally by anything much on Earth. To infrared and ultraviolet light, clear air is like thick fog, so evidently there has not been much evolutionary pressure on mammals to be able to see in these ranges.

Most animals don't see any colors at all; some compress visual data more than humans do, using two primary colors; several bird species use less compression than we do, having four primary colors. It's not easy to make color-sensitive vision, so evidently evolution has not produced any species on Earth with five or more primary colors in its visual representation system. Some species see a bit further into the UV and IR than we do, but nothing sees much further in these ranges, because the air gets too foggy.

The highest frequency visible to humans is about 750 trillion Hertz; the lowest, about 430 trillion Hertz. Those are pretty insanely high frequencies, compared to any frequencies at which we can move electric charges around, which is why you can't make a nice green glow by waving a staticky balloon around your head, or even by driving an antenna with a high-frequency generator. This is why we have to use electron motion within atoms, excited indirectly, to reach the enormous frequencies that generate visible light.

But the human visible range spans less than a factor of two in frequencies. That's less than one octave. And within that small frequency range, we compress everything into just 3 numbers (RGB levels). That's like having a piano keyboard with just three fat keys in the middle, and the only way you can make different sounds is to hit each key harder or softer. When you compare the incredibly vast amounts of information swirling through the electromagnetic fields around us every instant, to the tiny amount of color information we actually detect, you could reasonably say that even the fullest exposition of all the wonders of seeing is just a tiny, nitpicking quibble around the basic fact that we are blind.

The frequencies we can hear in sound range from about 20 to 20,000 Hertz. Very much lower, but varying by a factor of 1000 instead of less than 2. We also have, proportionally, a much higher frequency resolution for sound than for light — we do not compress all sounds into a few primary tones. Even the western musical scale allows around a hundred distinct notes in the visible range, and on top of that we can hear the rich overtone structures that make the same note sound totally different played on a trumpet versus a clarinet.

We don't have good spatial resolution for sound; it's hard to pinpoint exactly where a sound is coming from. We have much better spatial resolution for light. By directing light through a prism, we can spread its different frequencies out in space, and see patterns that contain enormously more information than the simple RGB-level information that we get from our eyes directly. With a prism, sunlight isn't simply yellow, any more than an orchestral chord is simply an A#.

Just as a musicologist can hear violins and oboes and trumpets and an out-of-tune French horn in a bar of music, an astronomer can see hydrogen and helium and carbon and oxygen and their temperatures and the ambient magnetic field and the rotation of the star as well as its velocity relative to Earth, all in a little twinkle of starlight. That's how we know so much about distant objects in the universe, without ever having been anywhere near them.

[Slawbug]

Plus, you left out Indigo.

[nikki.]

A red-orange fusion. Fire cleanses all.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES

Plus, you left out Indigo.

indigo isn't a real colour, it's only in there because newton was a wacky mystic

[Celtic Minstrel]

Indigo may or may not be a real colour, but I personally have no objection to it being omitted from the rainbow. It's not really important enough of a colour to truly merit inclusion.

[waterplant]

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel

Indigo may or may not be a real colour, but I personally have no objection to it being omitted from the rainbow. It's not really important enough of a colour to truly merit inclusion.

harsh.


If 'none' is an option how about 'all'. For me it's like deciding my favorite part of a 'burger - having all in combination is what I like about rainbows.

Also, great info SoT. How does white fit into this? Is it 'purity' or perhaps some sort of conglomerate?

[Student of Trinity]

White is a conglomerate. We perceive as white any roughly equal mixture of reddish, greenish, and blueish light.

[inni]

Yay SoT I injoyed reading your post, keep them coming.

I pick violet for ultraviolet.

[La paix]

And let's not forget the very interesting photoelectric effect!

 

By the way, the "overtone structures" to which SoT refers are usually called "timbre" (pronounced tam-ber) in the music world. Timbre can vary greatly from instrument to instrument, even among those of the same kind. Obviously, they have to do with a variety of factors, such as strings, construction, bow, rosin, local acoustics, etc.

 

Orange is the greatest color.

[VCH]

All of the above isn't a favourite colour. It's OK if you don't like any of them. But liking more than one means you'll just have to choose.

[Student of Trinity]

That's right, timbre. I had forgotten the term. A useful concept for a lot of analogies, actually. Thanks for reminding me.

 

The photoelectric effect is indeed interesting. It's the one specific thing for which Einstein got his Nobel prize — though the citation is primarily for vague 'services to theoretical physics' that presumably cover relativity.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Fractal

Orange is the greatest color.

Hooray, a fellow orange fan. Clearly, we must band together and defeat all those green losers because there are simply far too many of them.

Dikiyoba.

[Student of Trinity]

Why the heck do the results look like a bell curve?

 

Edit: Oh, it's obvious. They represent random errors around the right answer.

[Callie]

Orange for the win.

[keira]

The answer is clearly Black.

[waterplant]

I wasn't happy about it but I chose. My earlier point was to do with my favorite colour in a rainbow. When I see a rainbow it's not like 'how's that indigo, hey?'.

 

 

Just saying...

[Alorael at Large]

Ultraviolet. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there, giving you cancer at the end of the rainbow.

 

—Alorael, who should note that this depends on whether you consider edges ends and whether the refracting object transmits or absorbs UV.

[Randomizer]

Infrared for when you really want a hot time.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Stuff, Stuff, and more Stuff.

Interesting enough for me to actually read. Oh, physics.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Clearly, we must band together and defeat all those green losers because there are simply far too many of them.

Dikiyoba.

The irony, the dikiora (or however it's spelled) is green.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Crisis on Exactly One Alorael

Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there, giving you cancer at the end of the rainbow.

QFT.

Also, great PDN.

[Swimmin' Salmon]

Well, you are still getting an independent dose of the UV while admiring your favorite color of the rainbow.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Originally Posted By: Fractal

Obviously, they have to do with a variety of factors, such as strings, construction, bow, rosin, local acoustics, etc.

Um, that's only for instruments of the violin family. There are other factors for other types of instruments, though I couldn't tell you just what they are.

 

It does make me think you might be a violinist, though.

 

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Originally Posted By: Fractal

Orange is the greatest color.

Hooray, a fellow orange fan. Clearly, we must band together and defeat all those green losers because there are simply far too many of them.

Says the one with a green avatar.

[Khoth]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

It's not easy to make color-sensitive vision, so evidently evolution has not produced any species on Earth with five or more primary colors in its visual representation system.

Not quite true. Twelve channels of colour, and everything there is to know about polarisation.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Khoth

Twelve channels of colour, and everything there is to know about polarisation.

Ah, that's what it is. I remember hearing about some random animal with 16 different pigments. Really, though, 16 is way above normal.

[Student of Trinity]

That is awesome. I had no idea. Though I may have eaten one at some point. If I were sure I had, I might feel bad.

[La paix]

@Celtic Minstrel:

I actually play cello. Sorry, I don't know much about other instruments, though I do also play piano. Also, those factors would apply to the viol family as well as the violin family. Whatever.

 

I've never heard of this mantis shrimp! It's really cool. It's quite amazing how complicated their eyes are, since one would usually consider shrimp a fairly simple creature.

[The Mystic]

I picked "none" because I really don't have a favorite color. Also, I noticed that so far nobody's picked red...

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

I picked "none" because I really don't have a favorite color. Also, I noticed that so far nobody's picked red...

You noticed that, did you? But you say you don't actually have a favorite color?
Hmmmmmmmm.

You wouldn't happen to be a red sympathizer, now, would you?

[The Almighty Doer of Stuff]

It's okay, red doesn't need anyone to pick it. It has the satisfaction of knowing that regardless of what color you pick, the results bars on the graph still show up red.

 

That is, if you're using the best forum skin.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

I picked "none" because I really don't have a favorite color. Also, I noticed that so far nobody's picked red...

You noticed that, did you? But you say you don't actually have a favorite color?
Hmmmmmmmm.

You wouldn't happen to be a red sympathizer, now, would you?

No, I just happened to notice after I voted; mentioning that was a bit of an afterthought.

Then again, this thread is giving me minor flashbacks. I had my wisdom teeth out when I was a sophomore in high school; and the pain medication they gave me was, let's say, wow. I've never seen any prettier colors, either before or since.

[The Knight Who Said Ni]

Heheh, red sympathizer.

[The Ratt]

I claim you communist?

[The Knight Who Said Ni]

No, I just find it humorous. Seems a shame to post this without picking a favorite color. So let's see... It's wavelength is 405nm and 473 nm. Let's see how many people know their wavelengths.

[Randomizer]

Oooh, oooh, I know *frantically waves hand*

 

Click to reveal..

blue

 

All those years of playing with lasers finally pays off.

[Velzan]

Vote Blue.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: The Knight Who Said Ni

Heheh, red sympathizer.

I warned you about talking to little green men.

[Celtic Minstrel]

Originally Posted By: Fractal

@Celtic Minstrel:
I actually play cello. Sorry, I don't know much about other instruments, though I do also play piano. Also, those factors would apply to the viol family as well as the violin family. Whatever.

Ah, nice. Cello would've been my second guess.

[Alorael at Large]

Apparently Spiderweb wants to go green by plurality but not by majority.

 

—Alorael, who almost said "indigo green" before deciding that such puncraft is beneath him. Nothing is beneath his signature, however!

[Rowen]

Where is the indigo?

[Celtic Minstrel]

It's shy, and doesn't want to be seen.

[Slawbug]

No, that's Violet. Indigo has no adjective.

[Student of Trinity]

It's indigone.

[Erebus the Black]

you forgot octarine

[Monroe]

The fact that octarine is not in a rainbow is exactly what makes it special.

[Swimmin' Salmon]

Unicorn should be a color of the rainbow.

[Monroe]

I think rainbow is already a color in the unicorn.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Monroe

The fact that octarine is not in a rainbow is exactly what makes it special.

Dikiyoba thought it was part of the rainbow, but only people who have magical ability or training can see it.