The color violet is made up of short wavelengths (blue) and long wavelengths (red). (Image credit: Westend61 via Getty Images)
There is a lot of purple in nature: lavender flowers, amethyst stones, plums, eggplants, and purple emperor butterflies. However, if you look closely at the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, you will notice that violet (other than the bluish shades of violet and indigo) is virtually absent.
This is because the color purple is created by our brain; it only exists because of the way the brain processes colors.
So is purple really a color? Not necessarily. The key to the answer lies in the amazing way our brains perceive and combine different wavelengths in the visible light spectrum.
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“I would argue that there really is no single color,” said Zab Johnson, executive director and senior scientist at the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s all a process of our nervous system, and that’s both the beauty and the complexity of it.”
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All colors start with light. When solar radiation reaches Earth, there is a wide range of wavelengths. There are long waves, such as infrared and radio waves, and shorter, high-energy waves, such as X-rays and ultraviolet, which can damage our bodies, Johnson told Live Science.
At the center of the electromagnetic spectrum is visible light—the light our brains perceive—which makes up only about 0.0035% of the total spectrum. This is what we perceive as the colors of the rainbow. At one end of the spectrum are the long wavelengths, which are seen as red, and at the other are the short wavelengths, which we perceive as blue and violet.
Sourse: www.livescience.com
