Does anyone believe that there are any colors out there that have yet to be discovered?

Question

.... And i do not mean a different shade of an existing color (ie pink and red), but a completely different color that will blow our minds?
I am aware of the color spectrum, and as far as we know we know everything about it, but we also knew all about germs and microbes in the early 1900's.... and of course that was proven wrong.

Answer 1

There really is no such thing as primary colors. There is no finite set of wavelengths of light which can produce the complete optical spectrum. However, light of any two wavelengths in the visible spectrum can create the human visual perception of any color. Human optical receptors are sensitive at three separate wavelengths. Other animals can have more or fewer separate detection wavelengths. Color perception is done by the brain by comparing the relative response of the three sets of color receptors. This is why two lasers are enough to generate a full-color hologram.

Television uses three (RGB, red green blue) for better linearity and interpolation, therefore more accurate color perception. Pigments are subtractive, not additive. A dye will absorb some portions of the spectrum. The details of the absorption spectrum generally aren't simple.

You can blend light with a practically infinite combination of wavelengths and intensities. But it still comes down to sensors at only three wavelengths to distinguish among them.

Answer 2

well its an interesting question. i think the best answer is that there is no colour that our eyes are physically able to see which hasn't yet been discovered. colours are found in a small range on the electromagnetic spectrum. either side of the visible colours you find infra-red and ultra-violet. you see they already have names but our eyes can't see them. some animals however are able to pick out wavelengths that we cant and it is impossible to imagine what these colours look like to them. So I think the only way we might find a new colour is by creating genetically engineered humans with eyes that can detect wavelengths we aren't naturally attuned to, and only they would be able to see it of course.

Answer 3

As far as I personally know there are no other colors to be "found". There are colors that exist outside of our visible spectrum (what we're able to see), and those are known as infrared and ultravoilet, and frequencies of light even above those (and some of those "colors" are harmful to us, such as radiation).

In essence, though, we know of all colors. However, the doesn't preclude someone from being able to see colors outside what most people normally do through a genetic abnormality.

Answer 4

"Color" is nothing more than our eyes' ability to see a specific range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The frequency of the photons in this spectrum range "react" with chemicals in the cells of your retina, creating a signal that your brain interprets as a particular color of light.

Photons with frequencies outside of this range don't react with the retinal cells and therefore we see nothing.

Different species of organisms are often "tuned" to see a different spectral range. Birds and insects are an example of this. The colors we observe in flowers and plants may appear completely different to a hummingbird or a bee, and thus allows them the ability to make finer distintions in the plants.

It's even been argued that homing pigeons can see faint colors in the earths magnetic fields, allowing them to see a "map" in the air that you and I cannot and allow them to navigate their way from place to place.

So, for us to see a "different color" would either require a change in the chemistry of the retinal cells reaction to light of a different range of spectra, or alter the brain's interpretation of the signals coming from the eyes.

I would hazard a guess that anyone experienced with psychedelic visual hallucinations would say altering the brains visual perceptions is one way to accomplish this!

Answer 5

You ask a good question that I think more people really should think about. But, if I may, I'd like to point out what I consider to be a fundamental misunderstanding built into your question, namely that color sensations exist "out there". They simply do not objectively exist "out there" at all. Rather, color sensations (and in fact, all sensations) are a subjective product of our mind "in here" as the result of the firing of neurons in our brain.

[The alternative to this is to postulate the existence of INFINITELY many color sensations objectively existing "out there" of which we can only see a few, bees can see a few more etc. But then, who or what so diligently selected and arranged this infinite number of color sensations? Was some rational principle followed in this selection and arrangement or is it all just random? Science is silent on such questions, because they are not part of science at all.

If you object to my claim that one must postulate there being infinitely many color sensations "out there" then you'd better provide a good reason why the number of color sensations is only finite and limited to a particular finite range of photon wavelengths (whereas there is out there in nature actually an infinite range of photon wavelengths). And you would also have to explain how we were so lucky that the particular finite range fell in such a fortunate place (namely the photon wavelengths most copiously produced by our sun)...As you may appreciate, pursuing this direction makes things get worse, not better..

It is an amazing (and profound) paradox that if you cling too tightly to the belief that everything in nature objectively exists "out there", because you somehow feel that's what science says, you find yourself actually abandoning science in favor of idle fantasy.]

By the way, I readily concede that my answer is incomplete. That is because our current understanding of how our universe works is incomplete. But I believe that if you think carefully and deeply about your question (in particular if you start to wonder about how firing of neurons in our brain, which is an objective fact, can result in a color sensation, which is a subjective experience) you begin to realize just how incredibly mysterious this universe of ours is, and how little we really understand about it.


p.s. I basically agree with spicypm's post. To his example of the homing pigeon I would like to add that there is among animals a vast range of senses that we humans have utterly no access to. It is well known, for example, that bats use sound waves to navigate through the world, find food, evade predators etc. That is, bats use sound waves the way we humans use light waves. The portion of a bat's brain devoted to analyzing sound is extremely well developed (as is the portion of our brain devoted to analyzing light). My personal hunch is that a bat's brain associates "colors" with sound waves in a way similar to how our brains associate them with light waves. That is to say, bats don't hear sound, rather they "see" sound.

Answer 6

Well, one of two things would have to happen. Either someone has a hughmongous genetic mutation so the inner lining of their eyeballs were not quiet like you and me or

Intelligent Design from unspecified outer-worldly benevolent gods is offered as Revelation.

So, that makes us uber-colorblind as the situation exists right now.

Answer 7

no. all other colors are from the primary colors. they have looked at everything in space, undersea and they haven't found a different color whch is not a deifferent shade of our primary colors which are red,green,blue ,yellow.

Answer 8

Yeah there is Red, White and Blue that has not been discovered yet....!!!!