• chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    Purple, the color directly between red and blue, is a creation of your mind interpreting a band of light that triggers your red and blue sensing nerves, but no green is sensed. The actual band of light we can see goes from red to green to blue. Purple doesn’t fall between those colors, meaning it wouldn’t be included in a rainbow, and isn’t any “pure” light you could see, since it doesn’t fall on the spectrum.

    Essentially, any time you see purple, you’re seeing two different frequencies of light that your mind interprets as a single frequency.

    • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
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      24 days ago

      Would this not disqualify any mixed color? We only have receptors for three colors, and if we’re arguing that purple isn’t a color because it’s actually two mixed together, that should also mean colors like orange, yellow, cyan, magenta, atc are also not colors by that definition right?

    • shneancy@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      ah a similar explanation to why yellow is not an actual colour either

      the silly explanation that has no effect on how we perceive, use, or think about colour. sigh why are the people responsible for those studies calling those colours not real? Why not just colours resulting from mixing other colours like the artists have done since the invention of paint?

      • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        Sorry for the confusion. Yellow is a single wavelength of light. We perceive it with the green and red receptors in our eyes, but it is a single wavelength. Purple isn’t a single wavelength, but two that are being interpreted as a color.

        That was the distinction I was calling out.

        • shneancy@lemmy.world
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          24 days ago

          and that is why i didn’t say the same explanation, but similar

          both, in my opinion, suffer from the clickbait disease “YOU CAN’T SEE YELLOW 😱” (directly, because to see it you use two light receptors combined) “PURPLE DOESN’T EXIST 😱” (as a single wavelength colour because as opposed to the other colours of the rainbow it uses a combination of red and blue wavelengths)

          i don’t blame you for either of course, i’m just expressing my general annoyance with the phrasing of both science facts

    • essteeyou@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      Your definition of color is based only on human perception? Is purple a color for a mantis shrimp?

      Edit: I guess not in a pure sense because it’s still two wavelengths of light. Perhaps a mantis shrimp can detect a totally different wavelength and sees it as “purple” or something.

      Now I’m thinking about how we don’t know how other humans interpret colors. Like what I see as red, you may see as blue. Ugh.

      • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        Definition I’m using is any color that can be expressed as a single wavelength of light. Purple cannot be, since it’s actually two wavelengths simultaneously.

        • essteeyou@lemmy.world
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          24 days ago

          Perceiving it as a color seems more practical though. It’s not like we look at “red” and think “ah yes, a single wavelength of light”