Colors

In Labyrinths of Reason, William Poundstone, described the “rotating color wheel” as a thought experiment:

“Suppose that all the colors are changing… What is green now will be blue in a thousand years, purple in 2000 years, red in 3000 years and come full cycle back to green in 6000 years… (This rate of change is to tiny) that hardly anybody would notice.”

 

Bill Watterson used that idea to allow Calvin’s dad to have some fun:

Lisa Barrett has a very different take on the topic of colors. In her book, How Emotions are Made, she asks, “Is an apple red?”. While the common sense is Yes (or No, it’s green or some other color), that’s the wrong answer:

“The scientific answer, however, is no. “Red” is not a color contained in an object. It is an experience involving reflected light, a human eye, and a human brain.”

But wait, unlike the case of sound, even the eye and the brain aren’t enough!

“For the brain to convert a visual sensation into the experience of red, it must possess the concept “Red”. This concept can come from prior experience with apples, roses and other objects you perceive as red.”

Oh c’mon, you say, everyone knows what “red” is. Each of us may have used different objects to identify “red”, but everyone would have it figured out, right? Wrong.

“To the Berinmo people of New Guinea, apples reflecting light at 600 nanometers are experienced as brownish, because Berinmo concepts for color divide up the continuous spectrum differently.”

 

As Calvin’s dad put it so non-chalantly, “Truth is stranger than fiction”.