How does color work. I know how light gets absorbed and reflected depending on the color of the thing, but that does not explain HOW things have color.
Like. I can have a red house, red clothes and my blood is red. But all those things are VERY different things. What properties do all of them have that makes them red? How does my red look red ? Molecules? And we can mix colors too. What specificly is mixed?
What quality in red paint is also present in my blood?
I am not the best at explaining, but what I want to know is what do same colored things have in common that makes us see them as the same color despite being very different kinds of things.
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Things don’t have an inherent property of colour per se. They have reflective properties which allows us to see them as a certain colour when light strikes the object and enters our eyes.
To put things in a different perspective, prototypes for invisibility cloaks currently work by redirecting light so that it doesn’t reflect back to your eyes.
So if the light never reflects off the object, you don’t even see it, let alone know what colour it “is”. Unless it lets out its own light, of course, like say a flame.
In short, we see things by capturing the light that comes from them with our eyes. The colour of the light is determined by the wavelength of the light. We then recognise where the light comes from, and only then can we recognise that lump of colour as a visible object.
If two things look to have the same colour, they have the same reflective properties. If they produce their own light, then they have they have the same luminescent properties.
And how do we know that my red is the same as your red? We don’t. We can’t experience what it’s like to be each other, so we just take common consensus as the rule. Of course, this consensus might arise from the fact that we’re genetically and structurally very similar to each other, but that’s not yet rigorously founded.
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