2024-01-13 23:00:00
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“For tastes, colors.” Does that phrase sound familiar to you? Surely you have used it on more than one occasion to point out the uselessness of two people fighting over each other’s preferences. In this case, “colors” appears there to refer to the great diversity of shades that exist in the world. Red, green, yellow, blue…
All of them and their variants form a wide fan that shapes the visible light spectrum. Now, did you know that in that interval the color pink does not appear and which, therefore, can be considered not to exist? We tell you why.
ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES
Do you know where the colors come from? Well, directly from the electromagnetic waves that make up visible light. And the light that we see and that comes from the Sun, known as white light, is the combination of all colors together. It is as if it were a set of many waves, photons moving together, each one at a different frequency and wavelength that, all together, generate that white color.
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Now, if we separated that white light based on the wavelengths of those photons, as happens when the rainbow is formed, the fan of colors.
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White light decomposed into its different wavelengths by a glass pyramid prism.
In this way, when that sunlight touches different objects, it happens that some of those photons are absorbedwhile the rest are reflected. Which ones are absorbed and which ones are reflected will depend on the type of object, the atoms that make it up and the internal structure.
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Thus, the photons that are reflected will be the ones that reach our eyes and our brain It will identify them as a color based on the wavelength they have and the frequency at which they are moving. For example, a red ball will have absorbed all the colors except red, which will be the one it reflects and the one we will see.
THE VISIBLE SPECTRUM AND THE COLOR PINK
Now, actually those photons that make up electromagnetic waves can move at frequencies located in a very wide range. In fact, the part that corresponds to the colors is very small compared to the rest. And it is that, he thinks that the complete spectrum covers a frequency range that goes from the 1023 at 102 Hzand the visible spectrum occupies only a very small strip around 1012 Hz. What is outside this area, waves not visible to the human eye, includes the well-known cosmic rays, X-rays, infrared or microwaves.
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Electromagnetic spectrum with focus on the visible zone.
Now, isn’t there something that catches your attention about that visible spectrum? Don’t you notice the absence of one color? The pink! And yes, the colors generated from electromagnetic waves do not include pink among them. That is, it is a color that has absolutely no wavelength associated with it, so we really shouldn’t be seeing it. Where does she come from? Well, we can capture pink as a combination that our eyes make from red and pure blue.
Thus, the objects that we see in pink color are not because photons reaching our eyes moving with a wavelength equivalent to that color, because that does not exist, but rather they jointly reflect the limit frequencies of the spectrum, absorbing the central ones. , and letting our eyes they combine giving rise to the everyday pink color. In this way, our brain is capable of creating a new color, which does not exist in nature. Don’t you find it fascinating?
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