Applies to many other colors as well. I “understand” why that is but it hurts my brain to think about.

  • musicalphysics@discuss.online
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    14 hours ago

    Colors aren’t physical. There is no way to measure color. We can measure frequency, wavelength, or energy. So there isn’t any light that is yellow at all. There is light, or combinations of light, that we perceive to be yellow but that is simply a construction of the mind.

    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      There’s no strictly defined set of wavelengths for yellow. But you could pick a random wavelength and as long as most people say it’s yellow, that’s a yellow wavelength.

      • musicalphysics@discuss.online
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        9 hours ago

        You can call it whatever you want but color isn’t a physical property of light. It is a construction of the mind. You claim a certain wavelength is yellow. A computer display can show a combination of red and green pixels that we perceive to be the same shade of yellow even though the original yellow wavelength isn’t present at all. Color isn’t from the light itself but from our mind.

        • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          Correct. You can’t measure yellow, you can only classify yellow.

          In the same way we classify all sorts of things. Types of planets. Types of animals. Races of people.

          But that doesn’t mean you can say there’s no such thing as yellow light. That’s like saying there’s no such thing as dogs because there’s no Internet dog property to measure.

          Semi-Subjective classification exists within science and within our language. It is a real thing. And so there IS such a thing as yellow light.

          • musicalphysics@discuss.online
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            7 hours ago

            The color yellow subjectively exists. Like I said at the beginning, color is a product of the mind. Objectively, as in is it directly measurable, light has no color. Physics deals with objective measurements.

            • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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              6 hours ago

              Objectively yellow is between 590 and 610nm.

              More bad news, there are displays that are RYGB, made by Sharp.