Brain Food...
 

This is something i've been pondering over. Your eyes see color, camera's pick up color, video camera's pick up color. All of these things see color, but is that the color the object is really? If i look at grass, a camera see's green, i see green, but is grass really green? If there was no camera's and no eye's in which to see, could the world actually have different colors than what we see? When we mix paint, are we really mixing the colors we think we are? I'm damn stumped...

without a light source there is no colour, every material (atom/molecule) has a particular wavelength at which it reflects the white light of the sun giving it the appearance of a particular colour

colour is independant of whether it is being observed or otherwise

man..you need to lay off what ever your smokin.

*choke cough* smoking is a good thing

So maybe color is just something our eyes do? Is that it? With different eyes, things could be percieved differently?

the colour would be percieved differently yes, but the colour itself would not change, to change the colour of an object you must somehow change the wavelength of light that it reacts to (dont say paint over it as that would not be changing it, only covering it with another object of different wavelength)

After light hits your fovea and surrounding rods and cones, it turns into nothing but chemical/electrical impulses that are sent to thier alloted tracts of grey matter. From this knowledge, I would assume that if one had an anomaly (sp?) in between the rods and cones and the grey matter allocated to them, then yes, a person may see colors differently than others see colors. But, this shouldn't interfere with that persons life b/c the colors would all be used relatively with other colors anyways. Interesting question...

So red is red? Regardless of how you see it?

not necessarily "red is red", but more like "this wave velocity means this wave velocity". Once you speed up or slow down the wavelength, it is at another speed which means that the color has changed.

if what you are suggesting is that we can make things change colour by altering the speed of light then i think i can agree with you, but... its after 1am now and id really rather leave this debate up to those who are awake and try again in the morning hehe

NOOOoo! What I meant was the speed at which the light waves cycle through wavelengths, not the speed of the actual wave itself. Similiar to sound i guess. (I could see where you got the idea though, I wasn't too clear in my last post)

That is an interesting point you bring up though, but we would only be guessing at what might happen since we cannot test something going faster than "c". Slower that "c" on the other hand:

http://www.physics.hku.hk/~tboyce/sf...ghtfreeze.html

you talking about time then? :weird:

oh nm i think im gonna sleep tonight, cya in an hour or so :p

... yeah. I am talking about the frequency of light. Frequency = the number of total wave oscillations per unit time.

yes but the frequency of light is inversely proportional to the wavelength unless you change the speed, and clearly we aren't going to be changing the speed of light any time in the near future, hence you can describe any colour in terms of its frequency or wavelength equally, it's just convention to talk about light waves in terms of wavelength