(November 21, 2012 at 3:31 am)Daniel Wrote: If you think it's irrelevant why don't you go and ask the next 10 people you see what the primary colours are. If they tell you "cyan magenta yellow" or "red green blue" or worse still "red blue yellow" doesn't that reflect their "world view"? Ask them how to produce fluorescent orange using their primary colours.
If those next ten people consist of painters and photographers, they will tell you that it depends on whether you're talking about the primary colours of pigments, or of light. The two operate in different ways and are not interchangeable, however much you seem determined to confuse them. Our eyes depend on pigments reflecting relevant wavelengths of light, whereas all light itself needs to do, reflected or not, is hit our retinas.
None of this alters the wavelengths of whatever colours are under discussion, nor do whatever words we use to describe them. I've had this discussion before, in the context of Romeo & Juliet: "What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet". In other words, the plant known in English since the latter half of the first millennium as a "rose" would still be the same plant, with the same properties, even if the word "horseshit" had been used instead. The essential roseness of the plant would be unchanged, "would smell as sweet", whatever our perception of it.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
