Leave The Rabbit In The Hat

Colours are an entirely human concept. They have no meaning outside of our consciousness. Words like “red,” “purple,” “orange,” and so on relate solely to light of specific wavelengths.

Newton, using two prisms, demonstrated that white light contained within it light of all wavelengths, and that once light of a specific hue had been extracted, a second prism would not—as widely believed—“stain” the light a different colour. The redness was intrinsic, not added.

Our understanding of the nature of light was further enlightened—pun intended—by the famous “double-slit” experiment, beloved of physics students the world over, which demonstrates the quirky, schizophrenic wave-particle nature of light, being both nuggety photons and rippling waves at once.

Science has unravelled the mysteries of the rainbow, which now reduces to a simple line-of-sight phenomenon caused by photons bouncing around in countless billions of water droplets before exiting at various refractive angles in the direction of our retinas.

So, that’s colour cracked then, isn’t it? It’s wavelengths of light, made up of odd wave-particle things.

And yet, somehow in peering into the magician’s hat, we lose the rabbit. Colours touch us in ways more profound, more fundamental, than a mere register of wavelength. We delight in a roseate dawn. Swathes of green bring us peace. Azure skies and aquamarine seas give us a sense of the vastness of the world, and perhaps a yearning to travel.

Colours affect our mood. We even use them to describe our mood: “Feeling a bit blue today…”; “He was green with envy…” We describe cowardice in term of yellowness, and a “purple patch” is what we all hope for. We use them to describe politic inclination. Red universally warns us of danger; green assures us that all is well. Colour words permeate our language and our thoughts. Indeed, we would describe such words as “adding colour to our language”, in a literal and self-referential way.

We are creatures of colour. Colour allows us to describe and understand the world, to differentiate, aggregate and classify, but beyond that it speaks to our innermost essence. Without colour, we would be very different animals indeed.