Is it our brain? Or are the things actually coloured? If they’re actually coloured, why? What makes them coloured? Why is water colourless but grass is green?
In: Physics
I know an overly edited YouTube video that beautifully explain this
Light, you an objects reflection of light.
What will REALLY fuck you up starting to question if I see the same color as YOU do when we see RED. Is it RED because it is red, or is it RED becausr you/I was told thats what red looked like.
I’ll take a stab at this, even though I’m sure someone here can do it better.
Light — which contains all of the possible colors we can see — is absorbed into everything. When we look at something and see its color, what we see is the frequency (or color) of light that isn’t absorbed by it.
So think about it this way. You have a bag of m&ms. You eat all of the colors except green, so the remaining color you see when you look in the bag is green. Now imagine that it’s a green shirt. The shirt has eaten all of the light except the green light, which is what you’re left with.
Little cells in our eyes, called rods and cones, can see the differences between these colors of light and that is how we can see what we’re looking at. People who are color blind have deficiencies in certain kinds of light reception.
Water is not colorless, it is a very pale blue.
When light hits an object, it can either be absorbed or reflected, depending on its atomic structure.
Water, for instance, largely lets light pass through it, but it absorbs reds, oranges, yellows, greens and purples more than blues. That can be seen as a very pale blue, noticeable in deeper water
Grass is green because of chlorophyll, the chemical plants use to produce sugars using light. The chlorophyll absorbs all light except green, which it reflects
Colors are how your brain interprets the signals it receives when certain wavelengths of light strike certain cells in your retina, generally.
There’s no reason you can’t see colors without those stimuli (dreaming, hallucinogens), and you can see colors that don’t correspond to particular wavelengths of light (magenta is what happens when your eye sees red and blue light and thinks its seeing something close to violet light).
You can also have alterations in the brain which alter perception of color- [cerebral achromatopsia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_achromatopsia), for example.
Ugh, this is sadly a hot topic and the mystic warrior types like to throw around chaff.
Colors come from the frequencies of light in the visible spectrum. It can be a mix of frequencies, and each frequency can be at different intensities. White light is a mix of all visible frequencies. Blackness is simply the lack of low-intensity. When light hits stuff, certain frequencies get absorbed or reflected.
Humans detect color through 3 types of cones in the eyeball. Red, green, and blue. They don’t line up perfectly, red and green overlap a lot. To deal with that (and a whole lot of other junk), the brain does post-processing. Color correction and over-saturation.
>What makes them coloured? Why is water colourless but grass is green?
Water is mostly transparent. It doesn’t reflect, so the light goes straight through. Enough water and it’ll look blue, typically. Grass is green because it’s full of chlorophyll, which absorbs the yellow light from the sun (past the atmosphere). It evolved that way. But different stuff absorbs and reflects differently due to the shape of it’s atoms. There’s a lot of nuclear physics I don’t get, but it’s like the size of the gaps in the microwave mesh only letting some frequencies through.
you may wanna look at videos describing how them blue butterflies give off that color, they are apparently (or not) not actually blue but have nanostructures that fit the exact wavelengths they give or dont give off or something.
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