How do Red, Green and Blue light combine into White light without needing the rest of the Visual Spectrum?

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As well, does combining Cyan, Magenta and Yellow light give you White light?

In: Physics

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your eyes only have cells for detecting red, green, and blue light, so when you see any color it’s really just detecting different proportions of those 3 colors.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Mixing Cyan, Yellow and Magenta lights would give white light to your eyes. As someone else said your eyes are sensitive to red, green and blue.

Cyan is Green+Blue, Yellow is Red+Green, and Magenta is Red+Blue. So that’s 2 units of red, 2 of green, and 2 of blue. So it should appear white. Obviously we assume the light sources are of equal brightness, etc since we already do that for red,green,blue lights.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They are primary colors, which means that all the other colors are made of various mixtures of red, green, and blue. So you don’t need the rest of the spectrum since it’s made of those 3 colors in various combinations

Anonymous 0 Comments

Humans are only able to distinguish three colors, red blue and green. True white is composed equally of all colors, but since we can only see three, we can’t distinguish the color red/blue/green from true white.

Other animals with more types of cone cells would easily be able to distinguish red/blue/green from other colors. There is no animal that has an infinite number of cone types, so with enough types of light you would eventually be able to fool even sharpest eyed animal with a “fake” white light.