Viswanathan K's Thoughts

At the end of Through the Language Glass , Guy Deutscher points out that colour, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. As is well known, the eye has rods and cones. Colour perception is because of the cones. In humans, we have 3 different types of cones which can detect 3 separate colours – red, blue and green (RGB). Only those three, nothing else. How then do we “see” so many other colours?   Well, if light happens to activate both red and green cones with equal intensity, it gets interpreted as yellow. Put differently, we are not capable of detecting if a light is “truly” yellow or just a combo of equal intensity red and green! So all those non-RGB colours we are able to see? It’s just a combo of those three colours we can detect (RGB) combined in different intensities (ratios).   In fact, colour TV’s use just this point. They (like our eye) only support 3 different colours (RGB). By varying the intensities of those three colours at each pixel on the screen, ...

Photos of space always blew me away. They looked awesome! And they got even better when telescopes like Hubble were placed in space thereby avoiding the dust and the atmospheric distortions that earth-bound telescopes suffer from. Take a look at these pics below to see what I mean: But after a while, such pics lose a bit of their charm because there are so many of them on the Net and also because you start to remember that the colours on the pics are computer generated ones. Which is when I started appreciating the informative pics. Like take supernovas. When they explode, they are said to emit the light comparable to the entire galaxy they are a part of. That’s a bit hard to believe, isn’t it? Surely they are exaggerating. And then I saw this pic: See that light at the center of the pic? That’s the light of about ten billion stars at the center of the galaxy. Now see that light at the bottom left corner? That’s a supernova! As bright as ten billion stars,...