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Illuminate- Part-II

This is specially written for my friend Mohsin,
Colors
What are colors? Let me guess what you are saying…colors are everywhere, its rascal red, bossy blue and gracious green, cute pink and so on. But …now don’t grab your eyeball out when I say but
But are those colors real. I mean can you touch and feel them. One might say what a stupid question have I asked. Look closely what I have asked. I have asked can you feel it. Answer is obviously no. since it’s a quantity which is measured by totally different quantity and organ. We touch and feel things other than light. Isn’t that right?
Light is thing which we need eyes to rely on to feel and know. So what’s the big deal in that? There is enough big deal. Let’s start from the beginning
Light, it is said to be made of different colors, which one can segregate using a prism. Try it you can discover it yourself. It goes like this. Take a prism, and hold a thin bean of white light (note here that no other light will show this property as well as white light will) and make it pass through that prism, voila! On the other side you find the famous VIBGYOR, remember class 6 lesson of light?
V- Violet, I-Indigo, B-Blue, G- Green, Y- Yellow, O-Orange and R-Red.
The purpose of taking you back to class 6 is to find something between these colors. Let’s choose three colors, which by art teacher are primary colors. Red, Blue, Green, colors before blue are violet and indigo, they have something in them common as in blue and red, going to orange, it has some of red.
Now the shocker is for yellow, what about it, its looks different than other, what possibly it can be in common and so here it is, yellow has blue and green in common. Don’t believe me, try it yourself, take a blue led and green led, pass those light through small pin holes on your white washed walls. Your wall will look yellow.
Still confused? Okay the secret here is that since the only primary colors are RGB (not ram gopal burma)
Other colors are just mixture of these. If you are still confused I will advise you to not to look into your water color box anymore, as I’m not talking in terms of paints, but light.
Light makes colors, light has colors, light is made up of RGB, try again yourself by talking 3 LED’s you will prove my point.
Anyway...so...if light is made up of such colors why don’t we see them directly as an individual?
If you read this correctly, I already said it’s a mixture. What we see are mixture of colors.
Now next question should be then why don’t we see everything white since objects reflect lights?
Correctly asked... and I will be happy to answer that.
We have been taught that objects reflect light and hence we them, this statement is half correct. The correct would be objects reflect colors and hence we see them in those colors.
Now why do they reflect few colors? Why not all, because that thing on your desk was made up of plastic and plastic is shiny, right?
Well it has nothing to do with shiny
Let’s switch off they light for some time. Now what do you see…..anything? Something...nothing?
Why nothing? Because light wasn’t there on any object to reflect. So?
So since there was no light to be reflected you couldn’t see it. You did see black. Black color I define is mixture of no colors. And that’s why when there were no colors there was black and I didn’t see any object but just black everything was black, every that shiny plastic thing on your desk.
Bu wait a sec….my keyboard is black now what? I will answer this question later.
As defined and as said things reflect colors, so a blue shirt will look blue because it is reflecting blue and not red and green. Makes sense doesn’t it?
You said we see objects because things reflect colors, so a blue shirt is actually reflecting blue color and rest is being absorbed. Another example would be plain glass, what color is glass? Can’t say?
Well there is no color actually you see as light passes through it directly leaving something or almost nothing to reflect back. So we don’t see any color of glass.
Similarly when we see water, especially in a glass, we don’t see color, as it allows light to pass through, and sea water? Well it reflects the light of sky, no please don’t ask me why is sky blue. But since you have already I will have to tell you it’s because of refraction. And that’s a long story
Right now, lets ‘focus’ on light right now. So we were talking about light and colors. And now that I have proven my point of light is nothing but combination of colors, and colors of objects are mere reflection of those colors which they don’t absorb. Just imagine how you would look like if you could actually see how you look and not by what color you are reflecting…..
Well you do have one thing at your disposal to look how you do look. Remember those old days when we took pics on a roll of Kodak film…that’s the answer. You guessed it right; the negative is your original look.
Pretty scary huh!!
But that’s the truth.
Now bear you beauty with you and be grateful to light which makes you look beautiful which we aren’t :P
To be continued…..

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