James Tauber's Blog 2004/06/07
Why Are There Three Primary Colours?
One question that has long puzzled me (although not enough to motivate me to find an answer until now) is:
why are there three primary colours?
Another, possible statement of the problem might be: why is the linear space of colours three dimensional?
Once when I posed this question to a friend they suggested the reason was that the human eye has three cones. But that could be the result of rather than the reason for the three dimensional colour space.
One possible answer is that it isn't three dimensional, it's infinite dimensional but three gives a reasonably good approximation and the marginal utility of adding more dimensions drops off quickly. This reminds me of music where 12 notes gives a decent approximation to the harmonic series—much better than seven notes which is the next best under 12 and enough that few have been motivated to go to 19 notes where the next improvement happens.
After all, isn't white light a combination of all frequencies, not just three?
If you take a sine wave with the frequency of red and one with the frequency of green and add them, you get a wave whose periodicity resembles that of yellow. But it isn't the same as a pure sine wave of that frequency. This in itself suggests that additive colours are just approximations.
Newton recognized that there were colours that didn't appear in the spectrum but were achievable through combining spectral colours. What I'm not clear about is whether such combinations require three components. Will a combination of two spectral colours only give you an approximation of another spectral colour? Do you need a third component to get non-spectral colours? Does adding a fourth component give you better approximations but with a far reduced marginal utility?
Anyone care to shed some light? (pun intended)
UPDATE (2004/06/07): now see Update On The Primary Colours.
by jtauber : Created on June 7, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)
Update On The Primary Colours
Already got a response to my primary colours question from T.J. Jankun-Kelly.
Some great points:
- "Perceptual spectral color space is three dimensional: two chromaticity coordinates (which specify hue and saturation) and one brightness coordinate."
- "The space is not necessarily linear, but most approximations to it are."
- "Two spectral color combination, depending on the colors chosen and the weight of the combination, can give you a range of spectral colors along a line through the spectral color space (on the CIE diagram which the CIE space is embedded upon). You can actual get white light with a combination of only two colors if they are on opposite ends of the color space and space through the achromatic point (white)."
TJK also cited http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colper.html which is a nice summary of colour science and makes a point that is key for me:
"It is found that many different combinations of light wavelengths can produce the same perception of color."
So there is a definite distinction between the dimensionality of colour perception and the actual space of light. I feel more confident now in asserting that the actual colour space of light is infinite dimensional but that it is projected onto a three dimensional non-linear space of perception.
So does that mean that the number of cones is the reason for the dimensionality of the (perceptual) colour space?
UPDATE (2004/06/08): TJK say yes. The number of cones is the reason for the dimensionality of the perceptual colour space. Chickens, which have 12 cones, would have a 12-dimensional perceptual colour space. Makes me think of a name one could use for an article on this topic: "If Munsell Were A Chicken".
by jtauber : Created on June 7, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)