If you compress the entire universe in a pixel, which color would it be? • Hacker News Board

Re: If you compress the entire universe in a pixel, which color would it be?

#11

Post by yetihehe » Fri, Nov 29, 2013, 1:00 PM UTC

filipedeschamps wrote: post #9

yetihehe wrote: post #5

This one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte

#FFF8E7 ... this is amazing, but also unnatural. What I mean is, how can this be an unbalanced thing? Why not perfect white or perfect black?

Because some stars emit more blue and some more red. Also you can't have 100% light in universe (without creating a black hole that is), so when you mix lights, you have to mix different colors as unbounded values and then divide by max to get some normalized representable rgb value with 100% luminosity. #FFxxxx means there is more red than other colors, but only a little more. If every frequency in visible light would have the same strength in resulting spectrum, you would have #FFFFFF.

Re: If you compress the entire universe in a pixel, which color would it be?

#12

Post by andrewcooke » Sat, Nov 30, 2013, 12:25 PM UTC

yetihehe wrote: post #5

This one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte

heh. that's cute. i knew karl back in the day.

you could also say that it's the colour of the microwave background, which dominates the radiation in the universe (it's the "glow" left over from the big bang), however that's cooled so much that it's effectively black.

i'm not sure how they defined average to avoid coming out with black from that. would be worth checking the paper...

Re: If you compress the entire universe in a pixel, which color would it be?

#13

Post by morkfromork » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 4:44 AM UTC

The entire universe is a pixel. You are inside it, what do you see when you look out to nothing?