Color

Yeah, unfortunately we did get some crappy news, today. Kate's last entry spelled it out, so I won't repeat it. And she did a good job of spinning it into something positive. In lieu of repeating her, I'm just going to write on an entirely unrelated topic, as if today didn't happen.

Color vision. To me it's astounding. You can explain the process of seeing in color scientifically, but that doesn't come close to encapsulating the experience of color. We all know that color is simply how our brain interprets light of varying wavelengths inside the visible spectrum (our visible spectrum, that is...many other animals can see beyond our range.) But that's just how our brain renders visual information. There's another component that comes from within and piggybacks on our visual experience. It's a strong emotional component that has very little to do with the science of color and everything to do with our humanity.

Your eyes orient themselves at the sky and capture light in wavelengths around 475 nanometers. That information is passed down the optic nerve to your brain's vision center where the data is crunched, filtered and then rendered as a sky colored blue. But then you experience the sky. Even though you've already gone through the entire process of rendering an image you don't experience that image until the end. And that experience is entirely separate from the creation process. It's sort of like watching a movie. A lot goes into creating a film from concept to projection, but none of that is evident or important when experiencing the movie. The viewing of the movie is distinct from the creation of the movie.

My point is that the magic of color doesn't lie in the process of capturing and rendering our internal world "movie". The magic is in how that movie affects us. From that perspective color is an entirely inexplicable experience. Without invoking the electromagnetic spectrum, wavelengths, or any other of colors technical aspects, try and explain what color is. You can't, can you? I can't either, I think because the experience of color defies description. Describe the difference between blue and yellow. Describe the deep, almost iridescent shade of green found in gardens across the planet. I mean, you can do it, but the attempt will almost surely involve self-referential vagaries and calls to objects that happen to give off the color in question. Describing color without directly referring to that color is very difficult. In other words, you could describe orange as, "yellow with a little red thrown in", which it is, but what does that tell you? Now you have to describe yellow and red. You could describe each of those by referring to canaries and cherries respectively, but if your listener has never seen those objects, you've again said nothing.

Try explaining the experience of color to a blind person.

That's what I love about color. It exists and it doesn't. The wavelengths of light we see exist apart from us, but the color the create in our brains do not. Our brains create blue, not the other way around. The science of color has nothing to do with the experience of color, and vice versa. Your experience of blue, while potentially vastly different than mine, can never change the wavelength of the light you're perceiving. Your and my perception of blue might be very different, but light vibrating at 475 nm will always exist as it does.

It's about as close to magic as you can get.

"A Ha!" Moments

I love it when you suddenly gain clarity around something you've puzzled over for some time. "A Ha!" moments, when all the requisite bits of knowledge come together in a quick burst of insight, clearing the haze of uncertainty. They don't have to solve difficult problems. Or even important ones. Whether the questions are mundane and trivial or large and looming doesn't matter. They're a thorn in your brain. And they stick there for good, occasionally irritating you, calling attention to themselves. You might ponder them briefly. You might think a little deeper. But eventually you let them go again until they rise up to bother another time. The wonder returns. And then, often when you least expect it, a solution arrives. And man does it feel good. Even if the answer isn't all that enlightening, it just feels nice to scratch one problem out of the "unsolved" category.

Here's the question, and it's newly discovered answer that prompted this entry.

The Thorn: In color theory you additive colors and subtractive colors. The additive color model involves light emitted from a direct source. In this model, adding all colors together in equal portions creates white. White light. The subtractive model, the one that seems more intuitive to most of us, behaves in exactly the opposite way. This system involves pigments. In this case, adding all colors together in equal parts produces black. I've always assumed, even though the two systems behave in opposition to each other, they must be related. After all, they both involve light, just differently emitted. Additive light is direct, whereas subtractive light is reflected (off of the pigments).

The Tweezers: It finally dawned on me that absorption is the key. Shine a flashlight, a source of white light, containing all colors at your eye directly and you see white. Shine it at a piece of white paper, which has no pigments added, and you still see white. That's because the paper reflects all light frequencies equally. All the light leaving the flashlight, all the separate color frequencies, bounce of the paper and reach your eye together.

Now add a mark of one of the subtractive primary colors to that white paper; say blue. That mark only reflects the blue frequency, absorbing all others. So we still see white all around the mark, and blue in the center. That mark is preventing all the light frequencies that aren't blue from reaching our eyes. So you can see now that if you then add, in equal portions all other colors into the mark, the mark will then absorb all frequencies of light and reflect none, and you'll see black.

It all makes much more sense now. Shine a blue light directly at your eyes and you're only seeing that frequency. Now shine all colors at your eyes simultaneously. You're now seeing all color frequencies at once. Your eye no longer distinguishes any one color any more prominently than another, and you see white. No color.

Like I said. The insight doesn't have to be a major revelation. I'm sure what I just detailed is old hat to many people. But for me a small thorn in my mind was just removed, and it feels good.