Colour Vision

(Published: 2020/03/03)

This is going to be the shortest post in the history of posts, but I just saw a quote at the beginning of a book and I loved it so much I think it should be shared with the world. To be quite honest, the book looked very dark so I decided not to read it, but the quote certainly got me hooked!

As soon as the light of the colours green, red and blue is mixed in equal proportions, it seems to us to be white - Hermann Von Helmholtz

Hermann Von Helmholtz was a German physicist who developed the Young-Helmholtz theory. The Young-Helmholtz theory is about how our eyes perceive colour and says that our eyes receive three wavelengths: red, green, and blue. The thing I love about the quote is it’s almost a metaphor for how humans perceive the world sometimes. When we get everything we want, exactly as we want it, it seems to us to be bland! We get greedy and add more ‘red’ and ‘green’ to make it colourful, only to repeat the process. I don’t know exactly what my point is, or what the colours represent, but I like what I think the author was trying to get at with that quote.