Sunday, April 29, 2007
Rainbows and Crap
So, walking back from my morning hike I saw a rainbow rising up from downtown (which I think is pretty much a daily occurrence – UH’s team is called the Rainbows, and those arcs of the visible light spectrum grace the state license plate), and it reminded me of a recent post on my new friend Eve’s pretty awesome blog where she was asking who the hell sees indigo in the color spectrum. And it’s true – I looked real close at this rainbow – no indigo. I saw a shimmer of red, a lot of peach, which faded into orange, a real distinct yellow, a faint green, two distinct blues – sky & royal – and a shimmer of purple.
At the risk of repeating some of my comments on her post, I recently saw Neil deGrasse Tyson speak in the packed basement of Union Hall (Tyson, People’s Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive [but, as he said, "consider the field!"], recent author of Death By Black Hole, the most-appeared guest on "The Colbert Report", and one of the cooler supergeeks you’ll ever meet [the man carries a radiation detector, so it will beep if he gets too close to any gamma rays]), and he claimed that very few people actually see indigo and that Newton inserted indigo into the spectrum so there would be seven colors, which matches up with his mystical numerological voodoo (Newton considered his contributions to alchemy to be at least as important as his calculus or his laws of motion).
Could color vision be that subjective? Neurological research suggests that there are six visual tones (or really, three pairs of complements) which our neurons code – red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white. Aristotle wrote that there were three colors in the rainbow (red, yellow, blue), and this morning, after I decided I’d write about this subject I opened a 600+ page volume, while on the john, to a page in an essay Jung wrote on alchemy where he refers to the four colors of the rainbow (red, yellow, green, blue). In East Asia, green has long been considered a shade of blue, but light grey and dark grey have different names. It all shows that there is no consensus on how many colors are in a spectrum; it matters where you draw the lines.
Colin Wilson, in The Occult, claims that, unless our color vision has evolved in the two millennia since Aristotle, it may be that our senses are becoming more sensitive to subtle nuances. He paraphrases psychical researcher Fred Myers as to say that it’s possible we have many more such latent senses to which we have not tapped in – if intuition is analogous to the basic three-color vision; clairvoyance or prognostication may be the next stage in developing that sense.
While indigo may be very difficult to see, there’s another shade of blue that stands out in the spectrum – the sky blue I saw, commonly called cyan. Scientists who study color have reached a consensus that if there are seven groupings of wavelengths in the spectrum, it’s ROY G CBV, which isn’t as easy for schoolkids to remember, but that’s science for you. If we can reclassify Pluto as a Kuiper object, we can certainly shift around the colors of the rainbow. As long as there are seven.
Of course, if indigo ain’t in the spectrum, and cyan is, what about all of those New Age chakra books that say the sixth chakra (ajna, the third eye) is indigo? To be fair, I’ve often read that the fifth (the throat chakra, whose Sanskrit name escapes me now) is sky blue, so maybe the aura readers were just prey to Newtonian tomfoolery, tricked into seeing blue as this alleged “indigo”. You see what you expect.
[funny sidenote: the first song that came on my shuffle after writing this post was The Sea & Cake’s cover of Bowie’s “Sound & Vision”, with the lines “Blue, blue, electric blue… don’t you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?”]
At the risk of repeating some of my comments on her post, I recently saw Neil deGrasse Tyson speak in the packed basement of Union Hall (Tyson, People’s Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive [but, as he said, "consider the field!"], recent author of Death By Black Hole, the most-appeared guest on "The Colbert Report", and one of the cooler supergeeks you’ll ever meet [the man carries a radiation detector, so it will beep if he gets too close to any gamma rays]), and he claimed that very few people actually see indigo and that Newton inserted indigo into the spectrum so there would be seven colors, which matches up with his mystical numerological voodoo (Newton considered his contributions to alchemy to be at least as important as his calculus or his laws of motion). Could color vision be that subjective? Neurological research suggests that there are six visual tones (or really, three pairs of complements) which our neurons code – red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white. Aristotle wrote that there were three colors in the rainbow (red, yellow, blue), and this morning, after I decided I’d write about this subject I opened a 600+ page volume, while on the john, to a page in an essay Jung wrote on alchemy where he refers to the four colors of the rainbow (red, yellow, green, blue). In East Asia, green has long been considered a shade of blue, but light grey and dark grey have different names. It all shows that there is no consensus on how many colors are in a spectrum; it matters where you draw the lines.
Colin Wilson, in The Occult, claims that, unless our color vision has evolved in the two millennia since Aristotle, it may be that our senses are becoming more sensitive to subtle nuances. He paraphrases psychical researcher Fred Myers as to say that it’s possible we have many more such latent senses to which we have not tapped in – if intuition is analogous to the basic three-color vision; clairvoyance or prognostication may be the next stage in developing that sense.
While indigo may be very difficult to see, there’s another shade of blue that stands out in the spectrum – the sky blue I saw, commonly called cyan. Scientists who study color have reached a consensus that if there are seven groupings of wavelengths in the spectrum, it’s ROY G CBV, which isn’t as easy for schoolkids to remember, but that’s science for you. If we can reclassify Pluto as a Kuiper object, we can certainly shift around the colors of the rainbow. As long as there are seven.
Of course, if indigo ain’t in the spectrum, and cyan is, what about all of those New Age chakra books that say the sixth chakra (ajna, the third eye) is indigo? To be fair, I’ve often read that the fifth (the throat chakra, whose Sanskrit name escapes me now) is sky blue, so maybe the aura readers were just prey to Newtonian tomfoolery, tricked into seeing blue as this alleged “indigo”. You see what you expect.
[funny sidenote: the first song that came on my shuffle after writing this post was The Sea & Cake’s cover of Bowie’s “Sound & Vision”, with the lines “Blue, blue, electric blue… don’t you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?”]
