Does Colour Exist?

When you look at the nature: the azure seawater, so clear that you can see the beautiful, small little clown fishes below; then you looked skywards: the beautiful red evening sky with golden-yellow clouds… ahh, how beautiful is this world with colours.

But here’s the bombshell: colours do not exist. Yes, colours do not exist. You may ask: then why we see colour? The answer is simple: our brain.

When you look at the vast spectrum of electromagnetic wave, did you realize that there’s this particular segment in between that differs from others? Yes, the “visible light” spectrum. More significantly, they have colours. These colours are what we called “visible light”. In fact, this particular range of electromagnetic wave is no different from any other wavelengths of electromagnetic wave, say, gamma rays. Then why it could be detected by us and exhibit colours?

Our eye is a near-perfect organ. It works so perfectly that the lens changes it shape so that image can be formed at the sharpest focus on our retina, and our retina has numerous highly-sophisticated photoreceptor cells that can detect even the slightest amount of photons that falls on it, being even more sensitive than a digital camera sensor. Light that falls on a person’s retina is detected by the photoreceptor cells and converted into electrical impulses. The electrical impulses are then fired to his brains to be read. And now the interpretations are being made by our brains.

Experiments have tell us that light is no more than mere electromagnetic waves. The vast electromagnetic wave spectrum covers from radio waves to gamma rays, all are invisible but the segment in between- light rays. Now here’s the question: why light has colours? Why mere waves can have something as beautiful and interesting as colours? Aren’t they just waves? Well yes, they’re just waves, and they don’t exhibit colour as we see.

When the electrical impulses were read by the person’s brain, they were interpreted into something different from what it is per se. Of course, our brain knows that they are just electromagnetic waves, but it purposely changed their contexts and added extra stuffs into the recipe, making light radically different from what it really is. For example, our brains attributed the colour “red” to this specific wavelength of 620 – 750 nm of the electromagnetic wave, and “blue” for 450 – 495 nm. The reason for these “additives” are simple: for surviving. Attributing colour to certain wavelengths of electromagnetic wave means that an animal is easier to differentiate between objects and, in nature, predators.

Now we see that colours are just representation of something dull which is the electromagnetic spectrum from 380 nm to 750 nm. In fact, there are many things that are dull intrinsically that have been converted and interpreted by our brains into something interesting. An example is taste. Have you ever wondered, how can chemicals exhibit properties radically different from what it really is? How can some atoms, bond together to form a molecule, exhibits sweetness? The answer again, is our brain.