#badatstuff

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hiiw replied to your post “just so you know, the...

I never understand this. Like if something looks a colour, it is that colour, right? That’s what colour is, isn’t it?

this was more or less jacob’s argument. “colour is just light, which is what we can see, so anything that looks blue, is.” it’s a reasonable argument. same as saying banana’s aren’t berries. there’s a very real logic behind it. and most people in life will not argue it. even i wouldn’t for the most part.

unfortunately for them, i have an intense interest in colour theory as well as birds. also they’re colourblind. so what looks blue to them, often looks purple to me. objectivity is not so simple with colour, which is why i love it so much.

there is chemical construction and wavelength construction when talking about the way colours Are. if we were observing the peacock’s (using peacocks cause the first recorded people to look into structural colouration did, cause they’re obvious birds) tail without light, scanning it for its chemical makeup, etc, we would be convinced it’s brown. the Dye, the Biological Make-up of the peacock makes it brown. but it has a microscopically thin film that breaks up the light, refracting it into the blue-green area of the light spectrum. most examples of blue in nature are because of this. marble berries, emperor butterflies.

there are many different ways these layers, these films, are constructed, and they often are stacked, which is why peacocks look so shiny and blue jays look bright blue but dull.

hope that helped a little! 

See, if I’m talking about what colour something is, I’m not really thinking about chemical makeup. Like by that kind of definition, is the sky colourless? I really do appreciate your coolness with the common definitions though, it really bugs me when academics and experts think their jargon trumps commonly understood meaning, like nah, you took pre-existing words, adapted them to your purposes for your insular community, and now you expect us to accept your way, nope!

yeah like. there’s no need to get precious about it. but i’m not an academic or an expert so i probably have that going for me.

My county: upload.wikimedia.org/wi…