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Imagine a world in which everything was the "colour" of daylight-white. Life would be very drab. Luckily, our world is colourful. Our eyes are able to tell the difference between different wavelengths of visible light as different colours. Each wavelength of light, or combination of wavelenths, is a particular colour. The longest wavelength that we can see is red light, and the shortest wavelengths are blue and violet. |
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| Seeing In Colour You can see colours when light reflecting off objects is detected by colour-sensitive cells in your eyes. All coloured objects and paints contain pigments. These are substances that absorb certain colours and reflect other. You can see the colour of an object because it reflects only light of that colour.
Many Animals do not see in colour! Their eyes cannot distinguish between different wavelengths, so they live in a world in which everything is colourless. |
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Rainbow Colours The different colours that make up white light can be seen when a beam of light is split by a prism. The prism bends the different wavelengths by different amounts, and disperses them (spreads them out) into a spectrum so that they can be seen. |
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| Mixing Colours Red, green and blue are known as the primary colours: you can mix these colours together to make almost any other colour. If red, green and blue wavelengths of lights are mixed together, we see them as white light. When two primary colours overlap, they produce a secondary colour. Red and blue make magenta Red and green make yellow Green and blue make cyan. |
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