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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>Is it that the ‘yellow’ we experience from Additive colour mixing is not the ‘true’ yellow we see in the rainbow?
Yes, that’s right. If you shine a mixture of red and green light through an optical prism, the two colors will separate back out. If you shine true yellow light through the prism, there’s nothing to separate.
It’s just that your eyes can’t distinguish those two possibilities. True yellow light activates both “red” and “green” cones by being a color somewhat close to both red and green. The mix of red and green light activates both cones too, by having one component that activates one and another component that activates the other. (I’m simplifying here, but that’s the basic situation.) So you have the same experience in both cases.
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