Fun fact; due to the way your eye detects color, that is, the three types of cone cell: S, M, and L (blue, green, and red, respectively), there are colors that, while technically possible, cannot be seen, due to the fact that the mix of signals required for the eye to send the signals that would cause them cannot be generated by visible light. This is because the wavelengths that activate these cones overlap.
In particular, because your “green cones” are in the middle, in terms of sensitivity to wavelength, any possible light that activates them also activates your “red cones” and/or your “blue cones”. This means that there is a green that you are, theoretically, capable of perceiving, should you induce “green cones” to fire without firing “red” or “blue cones”, but it’s literally impossible for any real object to ever look that green.
So magenta isn’t real, and there’s a real green you can never see.
Eyes are weird.
“The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.”
Consider it demolished, Guildenstern.
serious question though: at what point in the purple spectrum does the purple stop being ‘real’? what is the last actual wavelength of purple? 400? anything redder-looking than indigo?
additional question: we cant see ultra-violet so what does it look like on a light display when the wavelength shades off that way, below 400? does it just look ‘stuck’ on whatever the last wavelength of purple it is that we can see? or does it just fade to black and grey as the information we can perceive dwindles?
There is a little bit of information on what wavelengths lower than (most) humans can see look like. The lens of your eye is what filters out some of those UV rays and for a long time removal was the treatment for cataracts. Monet had one such lens removed and left the other cataract in tact. He made a few (and I believe destroyed some) painting pairs with one eye each. You can read more about it here.
Of course, we can’t see what he saw but he did do his best to show us what it looked like. Basically, the difference was this:
As for what color any of this is beyond the visible spectrum, we can’t really put something to that because we have no reference point. Other animals do ‘see’ in ranges we can’t. (Whether that gets processed as a color, I don’t know?) We still perceive these other wavelengths though – we can feel IR as heat, and microwaves and radiowaves are fairly familiar.
Ummm, but potassium has the
emission spectra close to magenta because it’s made of two wavelengths: red and violet.
Also, you don’t have brown in light spectrum either, but it exist (probably?).
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