Why isn’t there a seam on the color wheel?
As part of Brown’s Center for Vision Research’s 5th year anniversary event, we asked members of the Brown faculty from across disciplines to respond to this question.
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- Date: Fall 2012
- People: Justin Broackes, Paul Guyer, Michael Stewart, Leslie Welch, Dar Meshi, Douglas Kutach, Ian Gonsher
Why isn’t there a seam on the color wheel?
One might expect to find it somewhere between red and violet. If the visible spectrum is measured as decreasing wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, from red (620-750 nm) to violet (380-450 nm), from the lowest frequencies to the highest, placing red and violet at opposing “edges” of this spectrum, why aren’t red and violet qualitatively more dissimilar? Instead of this dissimilarity, one finds the same continuity between red and violet that one finds between any other adjacent areas on the color wheel.
As part of Brown’s Center for Vision Research’s 5th year anniversary event, we asked members of the Brown faculty from across disciplines to respond to this question. Click here to read what they said.
