The color perception

You might know now that objects emit light so certainly we have to receive it somehow to be able to see. This article is more biologically than physically oriented.

Have you ever heard of the essential light colors? The RGB scale that programmers use, well to explain it briefly RGB stands for Red, green and blue. A mixture of these colors can give us any other existent color. You must've even seen for an instance the figure aside. The question is: if light is a wave then for example if red has a wave with a wavelength that is bigger than blue then according to the optical physics the two waves shouldn't interfere they should just coexist so how do we sight the intermediate purple color?

Well, the answer is in our eyes. If you are somehow curious enough to rip your eye ball off for scientifical purposes and dissect it, you will find a thin film at the back of the eye chamber that's called the retina, this film contains light detecting cells, the ones we're interested in are called the cones. There are 3 kinds of these cones, one for every essential color so for example if the eye catches a light with purple frequency and since we don't have specific cones for that color by comparing the wavelengths of the received color and the elemental colors, eyes can find somehow that the purple is closest to red and blue wavelengths so the red and blue cones are activated simultaneously when the green rest untriggered, then the information is transferred to the brain that gives us the image depending on the stimulated cones. Without this brain capacity, we would've seen the world with only red, blue and green !!

This technique is highly used for technologies like screens, as they are divided into very small pixels that are colored in an RGB format, the rest of the work goes to the brain!