Red, yellow, blue -- those are the primary colors.
Red and yellow makes orange. And when I look at orange, it totally looks like a mixture of red and yellow.
Red and blue makes purple. And when I look at purple, it absolutely looks like a mixture of red and blue.
Blue and yellow makes green. And when I look at green -- I don't see blue or yellow at all. Green might as well be another primary color.
The thing is, I've thought this my whole life, to the point where it didn't occur to me that maybe not everyone thinks this. It was just obviously the case that green was distinct in being "independent" of its two bases. And it was literally last night that I had the epiphany that this might not be a universal perception.
So I asked my wife, and sure enough -- she didn't see it that way at all. Green to her looks like a mixture of blue and yellow, just as much as orange and purple look like mixtures of their two primaries.
Apparently, I've been nuts for my entire life. Unless the internet can now come to save me.
3 comments:
Oh, my sweet summer child. There is no such thing as “the primary colors.” There is a spectrum of wavelengths of light. And there are three types of human cone cells that respond to different, overlapping, parts of the spectrum. The brain organizes the information from which types of cone cells are active into a perception of a single color, even if the incoming light in that region is a mixture of wavelengths.
Everything else, and I mean EVERYTHING, is a human construction to impose a simplifying intellectual order on the messy world. There are hundreds of different color systems. Some use three primary colors, but of those, most use a green rather than a yellow as one of the three. It turns out that the red-yellow-blue system reflects artists’ experience mixing paints more than it does the physics of light or the physiology of the eye. There is nothing fundamental about it. Take the green pill, do some Wikipedia reading, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
I'll offer you a partial defense: https://science.howstuffworks.com/primary-colors.htm#pt3
RYB (refined in modernity to CYM as in printer inks) is the primary color set for 'subtractive' color theory based on wavelength absorption; green is actually (probably?) primary in human-focused 'additive' color theory, because of details about which wavelengths are most likely to activate light-sensitive cone cells in our eyes. So green is 'different' from the other secondary colors in that it is fundamental to the physics of your sight.
Well, Green is a primary light color.
It's not as if all the colors are created equal. Oftentimes the rainbow includes the seventh color of 'indigo.' I've noticed in certain circumstances (such as video game team colors) you will see multiple shades of blue, green, and teal as being immediately distinctive before getting into different shades of orange, purple, or yellow.
Post a Comment