Having a background in sound I am probably coming at this all wrong but if you mix a 1kHz sine wave with a 2kHz sine wave at various amplitudes you will get various different sounding composite sounds but at no point will you be able to emulate say, a 1300Hz sound. How is it that mixing Red Light at 462 terahertz (or whatever) with green light at 545 terahertz (these are numbers I am just pulling off google) at the same amplitude can result in a perceived frequency equivalent to 516 terahertz or as we know it ‘yellow’?
Is it that the ‘yellow’ we experience from Additive colour mixing is not the ‘true’ yellow we see in the rainbow? Is it our eyes that make up the colour based on the input of two discrete light sources interfering with each other?
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Light waves do NOT interfere with each other in the same way sound waves do. Sound waves are waves that occur in a medium (such as air, water, or a solid). Light waves do not have a medium, so they cannot interfere with each other in such a way (though they can create an interference pattern, but that’s for another discussion).
An RGB monitor is NOT mixing any wavelengths. If you zoom in close enough you can see that there’s actually discrete Red, Green, and Blue dots. It cannot create Yellow, or any hues in between.
What’s actually happening is that the red or green or blue sensitive cones in your eyes within close proximity to each other are getting stimulated at the same time, and your brain is interpreting this as a portion of the screen being a specific color based on how stimulated each cone is.
The same thing is happening when you see any colors of the actual wavelength in the natural world. The cones in your eyes aren’t able to see, for example, yellow wavelength, but yellow is close enough to both red and green to where it activates both the red and green cones in your eyes, and your brain interprets this as yellow.
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