• Question: why do colers exist?

    Asked by petrasinuova to Gopal, Becky, Angela, Hannah, Vince on 14 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by jess16.
    • Photo: Gopal Ramchurn

      Gopal Ramchurn answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      I guess you mean ‘colours’? White light is made up of all the colours you can imagine. These colours are actually ‘waves’ (which you can’t see) that hit against different materials as they reach us from a given light source (a bulb or the sun). Some of these waves get absorbed (because of the material type/pigment), and some get reflected. Those that get reflected produce the colours you see! If all the waves get absorbed, the object appears black.

    • Photo: Vince Hall

      Vince Hall answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      Yeah, Gopal is right.
      The different types of light are Gamma-rays, X-rays, ultraviolet (UV) light, visible light, infrared (IR) light, microwaves, radio waves from highest energy to lowest. The part we see is the visible light, it’s only a very small range of the light that exists. The different colours violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red etc are just different sections of the part called visible.

      We have cells in our eyes called cone cells. These have proteins called opsins. There are three types: red, blue and green opsins. These enable us to see red, blue, green light.
      These 3 combine to give us all the colours we can see.
      There are also people who only have two working opsin proteins, so they can only see two colours, they are referred to as being colour blind.

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