Why are indigo and violet in the rainbow and not just purple?
Why are indigo and violet in the rainbow and not just purple?
I always learned “ROYGBIV” as the colors of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, violet.
What’s up with the last two? Isn’t indigo basically just dark blue? Why is it violet and not purple? Can’t it just be “ROYGBP”?
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Actually, the answer turns out to be pretty interesting.
The short version is that what colors are considered "distinct" are heavily influenced by culture and Newton, from whom we get ROYGBIV, came from a culture which valued the dye called "indego."
Edit: It also seems Newton thought the number 7 had cosmic significance and thought there ought to be 7 colors.
More info in this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf7WT6TLy8s
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I still see people without color-blindness have trouble distinguishing some shades of red/yellow/orange.
Huh, I had always assumed oranges got their name from the color, not the other way around...
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There’s a similar lack of distinction between Green/Blue in the ancient world.
How would that arise? There's blues in the sky that are very distinct from the greens of plants. Or are the blue detecting rods (or is it the cones that detect colour?) that new that we can perceive blue more than they could in early recorded history?
You know how some people can tell you the exact shade of two colors that you consider identical? Turns out that giving colors distinct names in our mind makes us way better at seeing the difference and that is how we chop up the color spectrum from an infinite number of colors to seven. You think blue is completely different because you went to school and being able to tell the difference between blue and green was a requirement for you. If the school told you that the sky is a light shade of green and the forest is a dark shade of green you would adjust your brain accordingly.
I guess my point is that all colors are made up by the state and we indoctrinate our children into the government sanctioned system at an early age.
That last paragraph took a turn, haha.
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There's a great Radiolab about this, highly recommend a listen.
MAY 21, 2012
Why Isn't the Sky Blue?
What is the color of honey, and "faces pale with fear"? If you're Homer--one of the most influential poets in human history--that color is green. And the sea is "wine-dark," just like oxen...though sheep are violet. Which all sounds...well, really off. Producer Tim Howard introduces us to linguist Guy Deutscher, and the story of William Gladstone (a British Prime Minister back in the 1800s, and a huge Homer-ophile). Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue! Tim pays a visit to the New York Public Library, where a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last. Jules Davidoff, professor of neuropsychology at the University of London, helps us make sense of the way different people see different colors in the same place. Then Guy Deutscher tells us how he experimented on his daughter Alma when she was just starting to learn the colors of the world around, and above, her.
Bonus: The Colors episode
You can actually see it in modern times. The Himba tribe in Africa doesn't have a concept of the colour blue. There's not even a word for it, as far as they're concerned blue is just a shade of green. To us it seems obvious, the sky is blue and the plants are green but to them it's all different shades of green. It's not a genetic thing, they're seeing the exact same colours as anybody else, their culture just doesn't distinguish between the two colours.
Well it was the 1600s and he was a natural philosopher. Back in those days, all sorts of weird stuff ended up in the books because it fit a certain philosophy. Our modern understanding of empirical science is a relatively new idea.