Let me rephrase the question – Do we call the Visible Spectrum that because that’s what we can see or is there something different about that part of electromagnetic spectrum (ES) that allow vision to occur. Alternately, If light is dual in nature, being both a wave and a particle, is that the same for other parts of the ES?
Which brings me to the question that I’m most curious about; would it be possible for a creature exist that can see, the same way we see, but using frequencies from other areas of the ES?
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Light has the same physics as other parts of the EM spectrum. But it isn’t a complete coincidence that we see the range we see.
Specifically, the range of frequencies we see happens to correspond to the amounts of energy required to bend certain kinds of bond without breaking them. This also happens to be a range of frequencies in which most stars emit their light. “Seeing” things that break bonds would be hard, since that would require the production of new molecules. And seeing things that can’t really interact with molecules easily would be even harder. So that limits sight of the kind we have to a fairly narrow window around the visible range, although that range is wider than the range we actually see (some animals can see IR or UV that we can’t).
That said, if we lived on a planet where the primary sort of illumination were different, we would probably have evolved very different senses.
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