Colors

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

In GR, the two colors that pop up again and again are the green and magenta of
coal-tar dyes--the foundation of technocratic modern cartel-society.  But on
a related note, I was looking at Alexander Theroux's elegant, extended essay,
THE PRIMARY COLORS (in which he spins off numerous thoughts regarding blue,
yellow and red) and came across the interesting notion that human (or at
least western) ability to perceive *blue* may have come quite late.  *Green*
is often used to cover what we might consider blue (and to this day, many of
us have some difficulty in discerning differences of range between the two)--
the ancient Greeks, I'm told, had no word that meant "blue."  True?  I would
also assume some connections here with Einsteinian physics--we detect that the
universe is expanding because of the Doppler-like red shift.  And I have to
assume that color might change consistency along with mass, time and related
qualities.  Do the physicists out there have any thoughts?

Finally, you might check out Umberto Eco's interesting essay, " How Culture 
Conditions the Colours We See" (it can be found in ON SIGNS. ed. Marshall
Blonsky (Johns Hopkins, 1985), where Bert opines: "The seven colours of flags
and signals are probably the most a human culture can recognize--by a general
agreement as to categorizable expressive entities.  The agreement has come 
about, probably, because verbal language has shaped our average sensitivity 
according to the macroscopic segmentation represented by the seven colours of
the rainbow which is a Western conventional way of segmentation.  The agree-
ment has also come about because average verbal language, with its polysemy,
works better for common people when many names stand synonymously for a few
basic concepts, rather than the opposite, where a few names stand homonymously
for thousands of concepts. . . . 
	"In everyday life, our reactivity to colour demonstrates a sort of
inner and profound solidarity between semiotic systems.  Just as language is
determined by the way in which society sets up systems of values, things, and
ideas, so our chromatic perception is determined by language. . . . 
	"Thus the artistic activity . . . works against social codes and
collective categorization, in order to produce a more refined social 
consciousness of our cultural way of defining contents."

(And what, then, should I think when my computer refuses to run a CD-ROM for me
unless my video driver is set at 256 colors?)

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)