What is the difference between vibrations of red and blue

Crater lake, Oregon, USA , is widely known for its intense blue color and spectacular view. The appearance of the lake varies from turquoise to deep navy blue, depending on whether the sky is hazy or clear. The inviting blue of a mountain lake or a sea is unique in nature, in that it is caused by vibrational transitions involving hydrogen bonding. Pure water and ice have a pale blue color, which is most noticeable at tropical white-sand beaches or in ice caves in glaciers.

Green colors are usually derived from algae. The blueness of the water is neither due to light scattering which gives the sky its blue color nor dissolved impurities such as copper. Because the absorption that gives water its color is in the red end of the visible spectrum, one sees blue, the complementary color of orange, when observing light that has passed through several meters of water.

Snow and ice has the same intense blue color, scattered back from deep holes in fresh snow. Blue water is the only known example of a natural color caused by vibrational transitions.

In most other cases, color is caused by the interaction of photons of light with electrons. Some of these mechanisms are resonant interactions, such as absorption, emission, and selective reflection.

Others are non-resonant, including Rayleigh scattering, interference, diffraction, and refraction. Unlike with water, these mechanisms rely primarily on the interaction of photons with electrons. The bent water molecule H2O in the free state has three fundamental vibrations. All forms of electromagnetic waves, including X-rays and radio waves and all other frequencies across the EM spectrum, also travel at the speed of light.

Light travels most rapidly in a vacuum, and moves slightly slower in materials like water or glass. When light passes from one material to another material with a different density, is usually bends or changes course.

Different colors of light bend by slightly different amounts. When blue light passes from air through a dense glass prism, for example, it bends slightly more than red light does. This is why a prism breaks white light up into a rainbow of different colors. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.

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These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Performance performance. Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors. Functional functional. If you believe that indigo is an important color, then here's a set of spectral tables for you.

Did Richard of York give battle in vain so that future citizens in the dismantled British Empire would forever remember indigo? Did Mr. Biv conceive little Roy G. Where did indigo come from? When Newton attempted to reckon up the rays of light decomposed by the prism and ventured to assign the famous number seven , he was apparently influenced by some lurking disposition towards mysticism, If any unprejudiced person will fairly repeat the experiment, he must soon be convinced that the various coloured spaces which paint the spectrum slide into each other by indefinite shadings: he may name four or five principal colors, but the subordinate spaces are evidently so multiplied as to be incapable of enumeration.

The same illustrious mathematician, we can hardly doubt, was betrayed by a passion for analogy, when he imagined that the primary colours are distributed over the spectrum after the proportion of the diatonic scale of music, since those intermediate spaces have really no precise defined limits. John Leslie, The human eye can distinguish something on the order of 7 to 10 million colors — that's a number greater than the number of words in the English language the largest language on Earth.

The rods, which far outnumber the cones, respond to wavelengths in the middle portion of the spectrum of light. If you had only rods in your retina, you would see in black and white. The cones in our eyes provide us with our color vision. There are three types of cone, identified by a capital letter, each of which responds primarily to a region of the visible spectrum: L to long or red, M to medium or green, and S to shirt or blue.

The peak sensitivities are nm for red L , nm for green M , and nm for blue S. Red and green cones respond to nearly all visible wavelengths, while blue cones are insensitive to wavelengths longer than nm. The total response of all three cones together peaks at nm — somewhere between yellow and green in the spectrum.

The relative response of the red and green cones to different colors of light are plotted on the horizontal and vertical axes, respectively.

Values on the tongue shaped perimeter are for light of a single wavelength in nanometers. Values within the curve are for light of mixed frequency. The point in the center labeled D 65 corresponds to light from a blackbody radiator at K — the effective temperature of daylight at midday, a generally accepted standard value of white light.

This table is the result of an effort to interpret in terms of thermometric readings, the common expressions used in describing temperatures. It is obvious that these values are only approximations. The absence of light is darkness. Add light and human eyes to the darkness and you get color — a perception of the human visual system.

The retina at the back of the human eye has three types of neurons called cones, each sensitive to a different band of wavelengths — one long, one medium, and one short. The long wavelength cones are most stimulated by light that appears red, the medium wavelength cones by light that appears green, and the short wavelength cones by light that appears blue. A monochromatic wavelength of light or a narrow band of wavelengths can be selected as a representative for each of these colors. These become the primary colors of a system that can be used to reproduce other colors in a process known as additive color mixing.

When no light or not enough light falls on the retina, the brain perceives this nothing as the color black. When the light from two or more sources falls on adjacent rods in the retina, the brain perceives the combination as a different color. The rules for combinations of the primary colors are as follows…. Most of us with typical human eyes and a basic knowledge of the English language are familiar with the color yellow.

This is probably not the case for cyan and magenta. As you'd expect given that it's a combination of blue and green light, cyan appears blue-green — something like the blue of the sky but not exactly. I'd say more like the semiprecious stone turquoise than anything else. Magenta is often confused with pink, but magenta is much more vibrant.

Pink is desaturated red. Magenta is considered a pure color. More on this later. A close relative of magenta is fuchsia, which is a synthetic dye.

I can't think of anything natural that looks like magenta. Color mixing is not an all or nothing process. Red light and green light together appear yellow, it's true, but they can also appear orange when mixed if the red light is brighter than the green light.