I may not be phrasing this right, but basically how does the information translate from mere electronic impulse to interactive reality? How does the seemingly simple on/off nature of computer code result in such complex things as a high resolution image, audio, this website?
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Let’s consider a photograph.
Vision is based on light, obviously. White light can be broken into red, green, and blue components, which means that colors can be represented by describing them in terms of how much of each component they have.
A pure blue has no red, no green, and some amount of blue; how much blue determines how bright it is.
How is this related to binary, you might ask; well, since you have the ability to describe two states (off and on), you can use those two states to represent numbers.
The *decimal system* (what we’re familiar with) uses the numerals 0-9, as well as *places* — 19 has a 1 in the *tens place* and a 9 in the *ones place,* so the number is (1*10) + (9*1). As you can see, each time you move over a place, the number you’re describing goes up by a power of ten.
Similarly, the *binary system* describes numbers in powers of two. 19 in decimal can be represented in powers of two by:
1*16 + 0*8 + 0*4 + 1*2 + 1*1
or `00010011` in binary.
In this way, you can represent any number from 0 to 255 with eight **bi**nary digi**ts** — eight *bits.*
Wait. Weren’t we talking about images? Yes, we were. You can take those binary numbers and use them to represent how much of a hue there is — how much red, green, and blue light there should be.
Usually, images are represented in *hexadecimal,* another number system written in *base sixteen.* So, the brightest blue would be written #00(red) 00(green) FF(blue).
(16*15) + (1*15) = 255
With this information, a monitor knows exactly what color it should display.
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