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The Health and Safety Act 1971
Recklessly interfering with Darwin’s natural selection process, thereby extending the life cycle of dim-witted ignorami; thus perpetuating and magnifying the danger to us all, by enabling them to breed and walk amongst us, our children and loved ones.
I wouldn't call our brains bad at color perception. They simply adapt to the environment, which is a good thing. Unless you're in color science...
Now on a more serious note, I'd argue that if we had perfect eyes and wanted to assign a hue to the sun it should be red or orange, not yellow. Why? Well, look at the solar spectrum. There's about twice as many red photons as green photons.
If a laser projector had 100mW of red and 50mW of green, would that be red as well?
What color is a white piece of paper?
--John
To perfect (ideal) eyes, the hue would be more to the red, yes. By ideal I mean that the response is directly proportional to the incident photon flux. Since in that particular case there's about 2.5 times as many red photons as green photons I would argue that it should be a lot more to the red.
Human eyes are of course far from ideal. We are quite poor at seeing red light and we are merely trichromatic.
Objection, leading question! Besides, paper usually contains whitener (a compound with blue fluorescence), effectively making it an active optical component. It changes the spectrum of the reflected light!
Nobody?
Styrofoam is the same color as the light that strikes it.
--John
Styrofoam can also be black and yellow, if it's on fire.
Stars don't have "a" colour. They emit EM radiation due to a number of processes involving several elements' emission and absorption characteristics. They can be more one wavelength than another by merit of overlapping power spectra, but the atmosphere distorts that big-time, and our eyes are far from having a flat response across the visible region. (And the sun is most certainly not a black body!)
The same can be said for a red lightbulb, or a green lightbulb etc etc.
The nitty gritty of this topic here, is really about what we perceive as white, which as it happens; is almost any dominating colour that we're enveloped with for long enough, our brains just have to set a white balance..
Ian
Doc's website
The Health and Safety Act 1971
Recklessly interfering with Darwin’s natural selection process, thereby extending the life cycle of dim-witted ignorami; thus perpetuating and magnifying the danger to us all, by enabling them to breed and walk amongst us, our children and loved ones.