Things which catch my eye or make me think - looking for aquamarinegreen, the evidence and the truth of it all.....

Thursday 16 August 2007

Aquamarinegreen

I think the colour I'm imagining when I think of the most vivid aquamarine green is a "fundamental primary" - it would be the colour you might see if you could stimulate only the "green" receptor(cone) in your eye - (It should be emphasized that the colours you actually perceive are coloured by processing in the brain as light itself has no inherent colour, the colours we see are determined by the wavelengths of the light rays). Of course you can't just stimulate one cone, the other cones would also be stimulated to a lesser degree.

Professor Andrew Hamilton of the University of Colorado talks about psychedelic aquamarine -

"The colour of the green fundamental, at (l, m) = (0, 1), is quite another trip. I call it psychedelic aquamarine because it lies well outside the range of physically realizable colours, at least for people with normal three colour vision. The nearest monochromatic colour, obtained by adding white to psychedelic aquamarine, is around 497 nm, about the colour of the water around the reefs of Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, which I had the privelege of visiting in 1995. You should mentally subtract white to imagine psychedelic aquamarine in its vivid primal hue. "

http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/colour/primary.html

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