• Question: when someone asks you to think of a new colour why cant you do it?

    Asked by 09lomash to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 14 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      There are a finite number of colours that exist (so there is a limit to the number of colours). It is a bit to do with physics, which isn;t really my strong point! Light contains a range of different colours that the human eye can see…so any colour that could possibly exist will be a combination of these colours. Most of the colours you will have seen (blue, green, yellow, red, orange, purple, white, black). Any other colour is just a combination of these different colours – so you might get a slightly different type of purple (like lilac) or a slightly different type of blue (like royal blue or baby blue), but there aren’t any other colours that you can come up with, because no more exist (that we can see anyway…)!

    • Photo: Thanasis Georgiou

      Thanasis Georgiou answered on 18 Mar 2013:

      The human eye is basically a small photodetector. It detects light waves with specific wavelengths: from 300nm to 700nm (a nanometre is a billionth of a metre). This is called the “visible spectrum”,

      Although there is are infinite numbers between 300 and 700.. (just like there are infinite numbers between zero and one), the human eye cannot realistically separate two colours that are very very close in wavelength!

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