Re: [OT] Scientists discover new colour

On 4/23/2025 12:47 PM, anim8rfsk wrote:

shawn <nanoflower@notforg.m.a.i.l.com> wrote:

On Tue, 22 Apr 2025 20:02:18 -0700, anim8rfsk <anim8rfsk@cox.net>
wrote:
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Ubiquitous <weberm@polaris.net> wrote:

Rhino wrote:
>

"Discover" may not be the right word: "generated" is probably closer.
This article explains:
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/apr/18/scientists-claim-to-have-found-colour-no-one-has-seen-before

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I remember seeing claims that ancients did not see blue, whatever that means.
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There’s a harebrained hippie dippy, long hair, loose tooth vegan theory
that you don’t see a color until you have a name for it. So you don’t see
blue at all until somebody tells you the word blue and then suddenly blue
magically appears. We were actually taught this in college. You also don’t
see variations until somebody gives you adjectives. So primitive man saw
the entire jungle as one mass of a solid green color with no dark or lights
or yellow green or blue greens or anything. Need I add that the people that
believe this are maroons?

>
Of course people saw colors all along. What they didn't have was a way
to describe what they saw. So I might imagine people before there was
the word "blue" might not have differentiated the various shades of
the color but still noticed it. Maybe they called it sky colored or
water colored (if they lived near an ocean/clear blue lake.)
>

 But that’s not what they taught us. They taught us that you don’t perceive
color until you have a word for it. I can only hope that the college TAS
were just so stupid they got it wrong.

Iirc (and I may not), the eye's 'red' and 'green' color-receptors detect those wavelengths directly, and correspondingly paint the respective areas of the perceived visual field.  However, because there are no receptors for the wavelength we see as yellow, that color is a "lie" constructed by the brain wherever it receives *both* red and green stimuli.  (Fwiw -- and with apologies to Alice Walker -- I've recently read something similar about the color purple.)