Think Draw - Picture - why yellow is lightest

Title: why yellow is lightest
created on 24 Feb 18

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Comments on this picture (16):
1. AFSOUTH wrote: Outstanding!
2. katidid wrote: Pretty!
3. bugoy1 wrote: The title makes me want to ask, "Why?" :)
4. chelydra wrote: There's an amazing 2-vol book called The Music of the Spheres by whosis, a journalist, pub. 1948, repub by Dover. It explains everything!
5. chelydra wrote: Author's name is Guy Murchie. Revised edition 1967. One the most memorable of its many wondrous simplifications (but rarely if ever oversimplifications) is picturing the...
6. chelydra wrote: ...electromagnetic spectrum as an almost-endless piano keyboard... but instead of 88 keys divided into 11 octaves, it goes through hundreds, or maybe many thousands (or more?) of "octaves" â€” each octave being in this case a "color wheel"
7. chelydra wrote: But our visions cannot fully penetrate even to the limits one single "octave", because blue fades out into ultraviolet (as you go up into higher frequencies (= shorter wavelengths)...
8. chelydra wrote: [typos! vision / limit of . . . ] ...while red fades into infrared... we barely see purple at all because pure purple would be in the dark, in both directions...
9. chelydra wrote: The reason an octave is an octave (as Pythagoras deduced from musical strings' lengths) is that the wavelength of low C is double that of middle C which is double that of high C... and the frequency â€”the rate (in time) of the string's vibrationâ
10. chelydra wrote: ...slower at the same rate (8:4:2:1:1/2 etc)... When you play a chord of all C's, it doesn't sound very interesting, because the vibrations are in lockstep, fitting together neatly. That's why low, middle and high C are all called "C"â€”they have the
11. chelydra wrote: ... character, only bigger or littler... like ducklings Huey, Dewy & Louis following Donald around, with the same quality of duckfulness expressed in different generations (quantities per unit) of the same species.
12. chelydra wrote: SO... as you may have guessed, yellow looks most like white for the same reason purplish red and purplish deep blue (farthest red from yellow-orange, farthest blue from yellow-green) veer of into blackness... Because our eyes are capable of seeing less t
13. chelydra wrote: . . . than one full "octave" (=color wheel), that part of "visible spectrum that's right in middle of what we can see easily is what appears least dark, least murky... i.e., brightest!
14. chelydra wrote: WAIT... I might not have made it clear, (or might have accidentally said the opposite) that LONGER wavelengths go with SLOWER vibrational frequencies (and vice versa). By the way we can still sense the presence of colors beyond those we physically see w
15. chelydra wrote: ...with our eyes... Of skin senses infrared rays, which we feel as heat because they penetrate and vibrate our own substance... & we can sort of see ultraviolet light as "black light"
16. chelydra wrote: [Typo: Of skin > Our skin] ... Get Murchie's book. It does a better job than I can.