if photons don’t have color, why does light have different color

Question

if photons don’t have color, why does light have different color

In: 1

Answer 1

Light is made up of photons. If your definition of colour says that light has colour, then photons have colour too.

There’s some argument about whether colour is a property of light or only the human sensory perception of light. If photons don’t have colour then light doesn’t either.

Light is generally made up of photons of many different wavelengths meaning that it can have colours (like magenta) that a single photon can’t. Single photons, or light made up only of photons of the same wavelength, can only have fully saturated spectral colours, like the ones you see with a prism or in a rainbow.