why purple is on the end of the rainbow/color spectrum

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First of all, I don’t understand why indigo and violet are split… why not just call it purple? Ok, not my question.

Colors of the rainbow all make sense to me except purple.

Red – orange – yellow…makes sense that orange is between red and yellow, and it’s the combination of those two primary colors, nice transition

This follows with green, blue. Green is between yellow and blue.

Now… if purple aka indigo and violet are a combination of blue and red, how can it be on the opposite end of red (very different frequency) and outside the frequency range of blue? I would expect a secondary color’s frequency to be between the two primary colors that create it

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27 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The chemicals in your retina that detect violet and blue are similar to the ones that detect red, not to the ones that detect green, yellow or orange. Primates don’t have to tell apart more than six colours, we could do with even less.

That’s how evolution works: whatever works, stays like that in the next generation unless small variations work reasonably better.

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