Color nonsense

[Robert Norton]

Argus opines:
>
>magenta does not have a single wavelngth.  thus it is not
>in the spectrum.  in fact, if you get right down to it, its not
>even really a "color" in my opinion, more of an optical illusion.
>the java applets we were pointed to earlier were great at
>showing how magenta happens.

That's absurd. By the same logic one can say, "there's no one red
wavelength or one blue wavelength, so they're not really colors". There are
as many colors as you can discriminate differences in wavelength. There is
a range of frequencies in a solar spectrum that we call red, by consensus.
This holds for blue and green, the other two additive primaries as well as
for yellow, cyan, and magenta (mauve) the primary subtractives. They're ALL
in the spectrum. It's our poor brains that can't SEE the difference between
a pure magenta frequency and equal amounts of red and blue frequencies. Or
a true yellow (ionized sodium or hydrogen, for examples) and TV yellow
(equal parts of red and green). Our instruments, though, can easily
discriminate between pure and mixed wavelengths.

Next thing, someone's going to be telling me that there's no real "C" in
the musical scale, just a mixture of "A" and "E".

I've made my living for the last 20 years with additive and subtractive
color technologies. Trust me.

>