Sometime during the 1660s, English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton began a series of experiments with sunlight and prisms.
What Newton was able to demonstrate was that clear white light was composed of seven visible colors. Newton identified the ROYGBIV colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) that make up the visible spectrum. The visible spectrum is the narrow portion within the electromagnetic spectrum that can be seen by the human eye. Electromagnetic waves are actually oscillations of electric and magnetic fields traveling through space, and they exist across a broad spectrum of wavelengths, including radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays. Visible light, the portion we can see, is just a small part of this spectrum.
While there are species upon this earth that can detect (we tend to not normally call these detections “sight” but of course, then, you could not separate the portions of these waves that become to visible somehow all of color or “light”) more of these wavelengths than humans.
The visible light spectrum is the segment of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can view. More simply, this range of wavelengths is called visible light. Typically, the human eye can detect wavelengths from 380 to 700 nanometers.
All electromagnetic radiation is light, but we can only see a small portion of this radiation—the portion we call visible light. Cone-shaped cells in our eyes act as receivers tuned to the wavelengths in this narrow band of the spectrum. Other portions of the spectrum have wavelengths too large or too small and energetic for the biological limitations of our perception.
What we see as colors are differing wavelengths that become visible to us if they are within this portion of the wavelengths that are within this portion of the light that we can see that then separate into the colors of the rainbow because each color is a different wavelength. Violet has the shortest wavelength, at around 380 nanometers, and red has the longest wavelength, at around 700 nanometers.
As objects grow hotter, they radiate energy dominated by shorter wavelengths, changing color before our eyes. A flame on a blow torch shifts from reddish to bluish in color as it is adjusted to burn hotter. In the same way, the color of stars tells scientists about their temperature.
Our Sun produces more yellow light than any other color because its surface temperature is 5,500°C. If the Sun's surface were cooler—say 3,000°C—it would look reddish, like the star Betelgeuse. If the Sun were hotter—say, 12,000°C—it would look blue, like the star Rigel.
Close examination of the visible-light spectrum from our Sun and other stars reveals a pattern of dark lines—called absorption lines. These patterns can provide important scientific clues that reveal hidden properties of objects throughout the universe.
Certain elements in the Sun's atmosphere absorb certain colors of light. These patterns of lines within spectra act like fingerprints for atoms and molecules. Looking at the Sun's spectrum, for example, the fingerprints for elements are clear to those knowledgeable about those patterns. That is how we detect what atoms and molecules exist around other and/or exoplanets when we discover them and when someone says they have discovered an exoplanet might have certain elements that might have life upon them.
This is “color” and anyone can do this just as Newton did. White then is not actually a color but all colors. Nowhere on the visible spectrum is black. Black is the absence of all color, and yet we believe we see the color black. Well the way our visual cones we do see black, in a sort of a way, at least in the way our minds interpret it.
The photoreceptor cells (cones and rods) that respond to different wavelengths of light, when observing an object that absorbs most wavelengths of light and reflects very little, our brains interpret that as the color black. Our brains therefore do not detect a black object as the absence of light, like when we view the night sky and interpret it as having an absence of visible light.
Nevertheless, Goethe would challenge Newton’s views on color, arguing that color was not simply a scientific measurement, but a subjective experience perceived differently by each viewer. His contribution was the first systematic study on the physiological effects of color. Goethe’s views were widely adopted by artists. Although Goethe is best known for his poetry and prose, he considered Theory of Colors his most important work.
Of course Goethe is of course correct and color perception is therefore twofold. First there is the objective electro-magnetic waves that can be detected within our cones, and then there is the subjective color. Now obviously we can detect very very dark light, or what we perceive to be black and what we are viewing is subjective interpretation in our minds of something that absorbs most of the light and has hardly any reflectionability.
Conversely, we view white as something that is colorless. Snow, for instance, is very reflective, it doesn’t absorb very much of the light and our minds interpret it as white. The white snow contains almost the full spectrum of what we think of our color and if you placed a glass over the snow it would get intensely hot because the white is sending that heat back into space. So fresh snow sends heat back into the atmosphere and cools the earth. If there is less snowfall,however, then there is less heat reflected from the earth and that ends up warming the entire earth. Similarly when the icebergs at the poles begin to melt less heat is reflected outwards, retaining more on earth, which in turn warms the entire earth, increasing the rapidity of the ice melt, and everyone has a glass of ice that melts slowly, then more rapidly.
Water, on the other hand, absorbs nearly all of the light and therefore reflects little and so when the polar ice melts it becomes warmer.
And that’s off topic, but perhaps of interest, at least to me, because while we see the surface water as blue, that is again a subjective interpretation. Actually the The surface of the ocean appears light blue primarily because water absorbs longer wavelengths of light (like red) and scatters shorter wavelengths (like blue and violet)..This means that when sunlight enters the ocean, the red, orange, and yellow light is absorbed, while the blue light is scattered back towards our eyes, giving the ocean its characteristic color.
So this leads us to a gigantic limitation in our great human brains. We don’t really ever see colors in actuality; or in their physical reality as wavelengths, we see reflections of these colors upon our visual cones that then become imprinted not in our eyes themselves but in the fusiform gyrus. But whatever is seen by the eyes is chemically transmitted and nothing you “see” is actually what you saw. There are other portions of the brain involved in interpreting vision, but the fusiform gyrus is the primary region that places colorations upon the chemicals that are transferred to it. It’s not really that good at this; or maybe better depending on your point of view, because sometimes it will take differing wavelengths that somehow get mixed during this transference and blend them together, like magenta; or see something that has very little reflection, but knows it saw something and determine it to be black. Or see all of the spectrum simultaneously and think it’s white.
So this little bit of boredom is actually for the purpose of getting back to the topic of human coloration. No one is white and no one is black but there is the interpretation of these colors in our mind.
So in physics, a color is visible light with a specific wavelength. Black and white are not colors because they do not have specific wavelengths. Instead, white light contains all wavelengths of visible light. Black, on the other hand, is the absence of visible light. The correspondence of a color to a specific wavelength is called spectral color. White and black are excluded from this definition because they do not have specific wavelengths. White is not defined as a color because it is the sum of all possible colors. Black is not defined as a color because it is the absence of light, and therefore color. In the visual art world, white and black may sometimes be defined as distinct colors. This is different from the concept of spectral color in physics. You can use a prism to visualize why white is not a color. If you shine white light on a prism, the light is refracted into all different colors. Refraction is the process of light bending as it passes through a medium. Different wavelengths of light are refracted at different angles by the prism, hence the visual rainbow. White light contains all the various wavelengths that you see coming out of the prism.
Refraction is the process of light bending as it passes through a medium. Different wavelengths of light are refracted at different angles by the prism, hence the visual rainbow. But this prism that we can see are not the sum of all of the wavelengths that exist and our minds interpret colors frequently as blends and whether we mix them in mind because of indeterminate visual acumen or exactly how we see colors that are not wavelengths we actually see, I don’t know.
But since we can’t really see anything that is absent of color and we can’t really see all of the wavelengths at once, we interpret things that we can see as being white or black because it is the best our weak minds can do.
So let’s go to Africa, or the continent we call Africa, and the people that live there that we call white. Now I was trying to copy some pictures from an article but they didn’t copy so I guess you will need to take my word for it, but there will be references at the conclusion and you can peruse them if you wish.
Most people associate Africans with dark skin. But different groups of people in Africa have almost every skin color on the planet (except pale) from deepest black in the Dinka of South Sudan to beige in the San of South Africa. Now, researchers have discovered a handful of new gene variants responsible for this palette of tones.
Researchers agree that our early australopithecine ancestors in Africa probably had light skin beneath hairy pelts. “If you shave a chimpanzee, its skin is light,” says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, the lead author of the new study. “If you have body hair, you don’t need dark skin to protect you from ultraviolet [UV] radiation.”
Until recently, researchers assumed that after human ancestors shed most body hair, sometime before 2 million years ago, they quickly evolved dark skin for protection from skin cancer and other harmful effects of UV radiation. Then, when humans migrated out of Africa and headed to the far north, they evolved lighter skin as an adaptation to limited sunlight. (Okay that is to some degree possible, but the idea that white skin was advantageous has to be erroneous because white skin needs to be darkened to absorb that Vitamin D or be covered up to prevent it blistering therefore the white skin would not retain that advantage.)
But personally, the whole theory is nonsensical. You don’t see this across species, and pigmentation that has anything to do with the environment has nothing to do with absorbing vitamin D but with being able to meld into the environment. It was advantageous for polar bears to be white to not be able to be seen too soon as they go after prey, very colorful birds evolved in a colorful environment and didn’t migrate….
And why then would say people in the Alps evolve to be white because the altitude itself will provide more sunlight, and really for goodness sake until the Sami (which I will get to later) and of course the much later Vikings, the most northerly weren’t white…in fact no Europeans were white until roughly five thousand years ago, but the more southerly (Iberians) were brown and the early foragers in northern Germany and the British isles were black.
Bad theory but Europeans, even though they must know better by now…do know better…still mostly want to cling to some advantage to their pale faces.
So I will end, but continue in the next post onto the DNA evidence that proves 100% how white (light) skin came to be. At least I believe it does and the DNA evidence, along with the burial evidence is so overwhelming that since it has come to light, I haven’t found anyone trying to refute it. What I continue to find however, is those who continue to spout the old ideas without even considering the DNA.
Mr. Rohn Kenyatta, whose writings I greatly admire, always claims there is a bit of sinisterism in those of European descent, and the DNA actually proves that white Europe was born in the midst of the first, and truly, most extensive genocide ever perpetrated.
So the next post will be another boring trip into the science of DNA and the discovery of the genes from which pigmentation evolved and then show the evidence before returning to what I’ve written in the past about the development of white skin.
Nave, R. "Spectral Colors". Hyperphysics
https://library.si.edu/exhibition/color-in-a-new-light/science
https://science.nasa.gov/ems/09_visiblelight/
https://www.science.org/content/article/new-gene-variants-reveal-evolution-human-skin-color