Quote:
Originally posted by SATX*APhi
I have wondered if what I recognize as the color blue, you may recognize as the color orange. For example, my shirt is orange and we both recognize the color of my shirt as orange, but is the orange you see actually red and the orange I see see actually blue? We both call the color of my shirt orange, but we each see it as a different color, but don't know b/c to both of us, this is orange. Get me? Hope I made sense.
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The answer is rooted in physical chemistry. Your blue shirt absorbs every wavelength of color besides blue, and thus the blue light is reflected back to you. Your eyes have special cells that recognize this wavelength of color (and other colors too-- the receptors will observe paris of color) and cause neurons to fire "blue!" to your brain. So the color you see is really just a particular wavelength of light. Does that make sense?
The reason the shirt is blue and not any other color has to do with it's chemical makeup (what kind of electron configuration the molecule has). So, as long as we have functioning color photoreceptors in our eyes (colorblind people don't have functioning color receptors), and our brains are wired to pass on those neuronal signals from photoreceptors, we will all see blue as blue.
There's much more detail to it than that, but I can't really remember. Hope this helps.
-M