Muave in spectrum?

[Robert Norton]

Josh asks:
>That is to say it's not a spectrum color, right?  

No. It is a spectrum color. Every color the eye can detect is in the solar
spectrum. Every last one.(except those few frequencies that are absorbed by
components of the atmosphere) The saturations may vary but every hue is
there. I think this whole "new color" thing is a red herring. There are
minerals with crystals of a decidedly mauve appearance. Mauve may have been
the first dye color unrepresented amongst organic lifeforms but that's
about as far as I'm willing to go.

>In other words (which I
>picked up at http://www.whatis.com/cmyk.htm ), nothing "radiates" magenta,
>but magenta is a pigment, and magenta things reflect just red and blue
>light ("mainly").  

The sun radiates magenta along with every other color. So do certain
mixtures of ionized gasses here on earth.

That is cool.  But I'm not sure that I understand the
>"doesn't work to take an average" part.  Does this mean, rather, that we
>can infer that our eyes don't work out an average between the red and blue
>wavelengths, because if they did, we'd see green, but we don't (we see
>magenta)?

Red, blue and green are additive color primaries. A mauve colored light
stimulates the red and blue receptors but not the green. The brain
interprets this as magenta, mauve, whatever you want to call it. It has
nothing to do with averaging, adding, subtracting, etc. The brain is wired
to provide a cognitive value for every possible combination of relative
levels of excitation coming from these three flavors of cone cells. It's
very much like a color TV camera in that respect.

  (Looks like a good argument to me.  But I don't know this stuff;
>I'm really asking.)
>