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Asked by anon-209856 to Verity, Sergio, Nick, Maria, David, Annette on 12 Mar 2019.
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Maria Walach answered on 12 Mar 2019:
Colours aren’t discrete numbers – it’s a spectrum, where one slowly merges into another but our eyes can’t see the small differences between them. So I would say there is an endless number, but you can’t see them all!
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Nick Werren answered on 12 Mar 2019:
That’s a very difficult question – humans have three types of colour receptor – Red, Green and Blue. These colours together can make ANY other colour that we see in our lives.
This means that all other colours you can think of are a mixture of these three.
However, some animals have more colour receptors than us and therefore see “more” colour! The Mantis Shrimp has 12 colour receptors, so perhaps can see a whole variety of different colours.
Ultimately colour is just our way of separating different frequencies of light. When you see a rainbow, you are seeing all the different frequencies of light translated by our eyes into understandable categories – pruple, blue, green, etc – and that’s colour!
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Sergio Adan Bermudez answered on 12 Mar 2019:
There are many “colours” that we cannot see due to our limited visualization range, limited to the visible area. As Maria said, colours are a spectrum and we cannot even count them, they are infinite!
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David Whitworth answered on 12 Mar 2019:
How long is a piece of string? There are an infinite number of colours, as they belong to a spectrum, in light that spectrum is continuous, there is no gap between one colour and the next, like in a rainbow. The same thing is true in art. Think of it as you can always add a little more of one colour or another, like a little more white, or a little more black, where that little is the size of an atom. I will make a change to the colour, we just may not see it as our eyes aren’t that sensitive.
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