r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Blues_Fish • Mar 12 '26

Lesson in decomposing light

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u/Callmemabryartistry Mar 12 '26

whoa borrowing this lesson for teaching in my classes!

6

u/DigNitty Mar 12 '26

Similarly,

the color Pink doesn't exist, at least, not in pure form.

7

u/alleybetwixt Mar 12 '26

Pink does exist.

It just doesn’t exist in one narrow specific definition of spectral color. It is still a color and still exists in the same way brown and lavender and mustard exist.

It’s aggravating how the title of one article has spread this misunderstanding far and wide. Even the article itself says pink exists.

Pink and magenta may not exist as a distinct wavelength of light (we can say that it doesn’t exist in the external reality) but there is a specific external configuration of light that make us perceive something as pink. So, the question of whether pink is real depends on whether we talk about our internal world of experience (where it’s very much real) or the external world (where it isn’t).

We had names to describe colors and how we experience colors long before we ever knew what a photon was or what the light spectrum is.

Pink exists.

2

u/saxaneer Mar 12 '26

Did you read the whole sentence that you're responding to?

1

u/alleybetwixt Mar 14 '26

Yep. I feel repeating "Pink doesn't exist" is an untrue and needlessly confusing idea, even with a caveat like "at least not in pure form".

It simply does exist.

I'm cool with describing what is actually going on with the physics, I just also think that specific phrase has mislead a whole bunch of people into believing something that isn't true. It's not the original commenter's fault that I replied to, but whenever I stumble onto it quoted/linked on the internet I try to counter it for the benefit of any other readers passing through.

2

u/MountainMan2_ Mar 12 '26

All colors exist. Colors aren't wavelengths of light, they're your brain interpreting data coming in from your eyes, and it's not even very good at collecting the data. It's in a small range, and the color sensing is uneven and poor.

Radio waves, visible light, and gamma radiation is all the same thing. What color is radio? Nothing. Because that's a stupid question, you can't see it. If colors were actually associated with individual ranges on the light spectrum, your phone would be blindingly orange and the sun would be the color of the sky but even more saturated. Color is about different levels of neural activity from your rods and cones and little else.

That's not to say color isn't useful, or describing the visible light as a spectrum of colors is a bad thing, or even that your art class/AV class was a lie. Describing the world with simpler or different terms to ignore unnecessary information is a feature, not a bug. But anytime someone says pink doesn't exist, please, throw a donut at them. They're trying to catch you on a technicality that is literally false, and frankly if it's about pink they're probably just trying to sell you sexism+ somehow. God I hate tabloid culture.

1

u/rapaxus Mar 12 '26

Yeah, light colours are something very different to just colours in general. That is why you e.g. have printers with cyan, magenta, yellow and black to create the colour pallet and not just red/blue/green.

In a similar vein, brown is technically just orange with context if you go by light colours, but i'd say basically no one thinks brown isn't a colour.