If pink doesn’t exist, why can we see it?
“Taste, color.” Does this phrase sound familiar to you? You’ve probably used it more than once to point out the futility of two people fighting over each other’s preferences. In this case, the word “colors” means the huge variety of shades that exist in the world. Red, green, yellow, blue…
All of them and their variants form a wide fan, forming a spectrum of visible light. Did you know that during this interval pink color does not appear and what, therefore, can be considered non-existent? We’ll tell you why.
ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES
Do you know where colors come from? Well, directly from the electromagnetic waves that make up visible light. And the light that we see that comes from the Sun, known as white light, is combination of all colors together. It is as if it were a collection of many waves, photons, moving together, each with a different frequency and wavelength, which all together create the color white.
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Now, if we split this white light based on the wavelengths of these photons, as happens when a rainbow is formed, fan colors.
White light is split into different wavelengths using a glass pyramidal prism.
So when sunlight touches different objects, what happens is that some of those photons absorbedand the rest reflected. Which ones are absorbed and which ones are reflected will depend on the type of object, the atoms that make up it, and the internal structure.
Mysterious pink pond in Hawaii
Thus, it is the reflected photons that will reach our eyes and our body. brain It will identify them by color based on the wavelength and frequency at which they travel. For example, a red ball will absorb all colors except red, which it reflects and which we see.
VISIBLE SPECTRUM AND PINK COLOR
In fact, the photons that make up electromagnetic waves can travel at frequencies over a very wide range. In fact, the part that matches the colors is very small compared to the others. And the fact is that, in his opinion, the full spectrum covers the range of frequencies coming from 1023 at 102 Hzand the visible spectrum occupies only a very small strip of about 1012 Hz. What lies outside this zone, waves not visible to the human eye, includes the well-known cosmic rays, X-rays, infrared rays or microwaves.
Electromagnetic spectrum with a focus on the visible zone.
So, is there something in this visible spectrum that catches your attention? Don’t you notice absence same color? Pink! And yes, the colors generated by electromagnetic waves do not include pink. That is, this is the color that has absolutely no wavelength associated with it, so we really shouldn’t see it. Where does it come from? Well, we can think of the color pink as a combination that our eyes create from red and pure blue.
Thus, the objects we see in the color pink do not arise because the photons reaching our eyes are traveling at a wavelength equivalent to that color, since there is none, but rather they jointly reflect the extreme frequencies of the spectrum, absorbing the central ones. and let our eyes combine giving rise to everyday pink. Thus, our brain is able to create a new color that does not exist in nature. Aren’t you interested in this?