green laser pointer
rallain | February 11, 2010Do you have a green laser pointer? You should. They are relatively inexpensive now. What if you take your laser pointer and aim it at stuff in your house? The laser dot always looks green, right? This is actually a pretty important point about color. Suppose I have the lights on in a room and I look at a blue book. White light is basically all the colors of the visible spectrum, so a diagram like this might be appropriate:
So, the book looks blue (since that is what your eye sees). Note that I just showed blue light coming off the book, really the other colors reflect some too but…