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”?

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    It doesn’t contain pink or brown. Some of the colours we see are how we register a mixture of light frequencies, whereas each point in the rainbow is just a single frequency.

    • Rexelpitlum@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      What a phantastic thread!

      We have had linguistics, sociology, physics and now biology in the form of colour perception so far.

      Cross domain discussions are great! :-)

    • Dr Cog@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      This is incredibly incorrect. While many colors that are additive are combinations, those combinations are simply approximations of the single wavelength true color. All colors are on a spectrum of hue, luminance (brightness) and intensity (saturation).

      Pink is red with high luminance and high intensity, and brown is orange with low luminance and mid-high intensity