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’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.
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