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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Color is based on the wavelength of light that your eye detects. Red is at the long end of light our eyes can detect, with violet at the short end.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Linear_visible_spectrum.svg/660px-Linear_visible_spectrum.svg.png
This is for “pure” monochromatic colors, colors made of only 1 wavelength of light, but we can blend together colors to kind of trick our eyes into seeing “inbetween” colors. A combination of a red and blue would make magenta, a color that *has no single wavelength*. There is no single source of light, dye, or pigment which can produce magenta. It requires a combination of both red and blue.
The thing common to blood, paint, and markers is either:
A: the light they reflect is in the red region of wavelength
Or B: the light they reflect is a combination of light which separately look similar to that of red light, and so together our brains process it as being red light.
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