Worth having a play with colorpy, some nice examples here of how you go from a spectrum to a 'human' colour:
What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
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Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#22It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring. The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.
It's boring because it's not a "pure" color, as it must be a mix of different wavelengths that is weighted similar to what get to the surface of earth from sun. So it's boring in the same sense a white noise is boring -- it has little information. On the other hand, a more pure color means there must be something that is changing the sun's light as it reflects it, or it's emitting light of some specific wavelength, which has more information.
Or put it simply, it's the color of dirt, and dirt is boring.
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#23It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring. The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.
The vast majority of mammals have only black and white vision, quite likely because all the common ancestors the survived the K-T event (the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs) were nocturnal.
Some groups such as fructivore primates have since re-evolved color vision to recognize ripe fruit from unripe. Thus not only our ability to see "pretty" colors but our probable instinctive liking of them as "pretty".
Also, color is more complicated than simple wave length. Human perception and wavelength correspond fairly well most of the time. But we actually have three different cells for detecting color (rather than say two: one for high frequency one for low). The result is we can perceive a color like purple where in fact there is no one wavelength but a blending of two wavelengths. Pedantically by the way, red is a relatively low wave length.
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#24It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring. The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.
The vast majority of mammals have only black and white vision, quite likely because all the common ancestors the survived the K-T event (the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs) were nocturnal. Some groups such as fructivore primates have since re-evolved color vision to recognize ripe fruit from unripe. Thus not only our ability to see "pretty" colors but our probable instinctive liking of them as "pretty". Also…
Tiny fix: Red is high wavelength within the color spectrum. It has a low frequency, if that's what you mean.
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#25It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring. The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.
Someone told me red is shorter so we see it faster -- is there any biological evidence for this?
Not sure about the biology, but there is some evidence from physics for this.
The speed of light is constant in a vacuum, but different for different wavelengths in a medium. This is why shining white light through a glass prism causes it to disperse into many colors -- they each travel through the medium at slightly different speeds. Interestingly, the refractive index (how much the light slows down in a medium) is higher for larger wavelengths like red in the color spectrum. So technically, red light travels slower than blue or green light in a medium (eg. air, water etc.).
Of course I would delays in this would be absolutely tiny compared to delays due to neural processing .... but hey who knows, maybe we can tell the difference!
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#26http://www.thecolorofpaloalto.com/
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Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#27It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring. The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.
Maybe we perceive it as being boring because it is the average color of the universe?
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#28It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring. The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.
The vast majority of mammals have only black and white vision, quite likely because all the common ancestors the survived the K-T event (the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs) were nocturnal. Some groups such as fructivore primates have since re-evolved color vision to recognize ripe fruit from unripe. Thus not only our ability to see "pretty" colors but our probable instinctive liking of them as "pretty". Also…
That most mammals are color blind is nothing more than a myth. A few select are, like the marine mammals, but the vast majority are dichromats with red/blue color receptors.
The last common ancestor was in fact a trichromat, having one red and two different blue receptors. When mammals diverged further, monotremes lost one of the blue receptors while other mammals lost the other.
What did reevolve in groups such as marsupials and apes was the green color receptor, which was present in older ancestors, but had been lost in the first mammals.
source: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/15...
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#29Worth having a play with colorpy, some nice examples here of how you go from a spectrum to a 'human' colour: http://markkness.net/colorpy/ColorPy.html
Following your comment about 'ColorPy', I decided to write a quick IPython notebook using our API (Which is borrowing some plotting aspect ideas to Mark Kness package):
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/colour-science/colour-ram...
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#30Worth having a play with colorpy, some nice examples here of how you go from a spectrum to a 'human' colour: http://markkness.net/colorpy/ColorPy.html
Following your comment about 'ColorPy', I decided to write a quick IPython notebook using our API (Which is borrowing some plotting aspect ideas to Mark Kness package): http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/colour-science/colour-ram...
Ah that's nice, I was looking for a package that would do spectrum to colour in more or less a single line :)