eli5: Why is it impossible to imagine new colors?
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Answer from someone who doesn’t really know!
Colors are really just different frequencies, so what constitutes different? If we were able to see colors outside of our current range they might not look like different colors so much as slightly different shades of existing colors and so slightly different we might not perceive them. Sure we can tell the difference between blue and red. But within what we see as red are an infinite number of frequencies that we would perceive as shades, not colors. And the finer the frequency change the harder for us to tell the difference.
So for example I would imagine that if we could see infra-red it would just look like a shade of red to us, not a completely different color. As the frequencies go up the smaller the difference.
But at same time, I have no idea.
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