Re: Color

[brian whatcott <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>]

At 06:24 11/1/00 -0500, you wrote:
> Yesterday, an eighth grader ask is white was a color.
> Could someone please elaborate on the question.
> I need the opinions for a colleague.
>
> Herman E. Carl

Many animals, most mammals, when looking at an object in sunlight which
equally reflects a range of em frequencies which we call visible light,
sees an effect we identify as white.
 The object which mostly absorbs this range we identify as black.

An object whose energy distribution differs markedly from that of the
noon sun can be different in two ways.
1) It is short on some frequencies.
2) It is overabundant in some frequencies.

If other objects in the field of view are perceived as 'normally colored'
this object is likely to be seen as colored. If all illuminated objects
 have a similar cast, we are likely to internally compensate for the
non-Sun light distribution and deduce that an object may be white
(as viewed under sunlight).

That's as far as I can reasonably take a hand-wave...

brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>  Altus OK
                Eureka!