The speculation in this article is pretty bad; a shower of cosmic rays isn't going to affect everyone in the planet the same way to all of a sudden enhance their perception of violet. The much likelier explanation is that it's "just" a cultural development.
> Egypt, Mesopotamia and the medieval Islamic cultures survived especially well in their extremely dry climates. And they had no violet in them at all.
In ancient times purple was a luxury for dying clothes, even in medieval times, and harvesting sea snails for the dye was lucrative business between egyptians, phoeniceans etc. so how come they claim we can't see it?
I dont think their claim is true. What's next? "Why it took us decades to see rounded corners"?
Consider the color orange. There wasn't a name for the color in antiquity. When the fruit become available, its color was referred to as "the color of a norange" (this happened independently in various European languages. Unrelated factoid, many languages with an indefinite article that ends with n, assimilated the leading n of the fruit name in the article).
Clearly our ancestors could see the orange colored before they met the fruit. There are other fruit that have that color too; leaves in autumn can be pretty orange too. Orange and brown are basically different shades of the same color.
What does that have to do with "seeing the color". Of course there are words for many exact things that are typical examples of some colors. People couldn't see a particular mid-dark red before Ferrari? Bianchi celeste color? Surf green Stratocaster? Or maybe when Pantone launched their color reference system, people then suddenly started seeing them? Think how walking in a meadow must have felt after seeing all the Pantone colors with their codes, and then really seeing the flowers' colors for the first time?!
This doesn't mean people didn't see the color beforehand. It is surprising that these kind of categorical errors get forwarded so easily.
> It is surprising that these kind of categorical errors get forwarded so easily.
This is usually a sign that it wasn't the article's author who misunderstood ;)
Physically, people obviously could see the same frequencies. But what to make of the raw perception has a cultural aspect - after all, the whole band from 400 nm to 780 nm is continuous, and we are able to perceive the complete range[0], so the color categories we use have to be arbitrary to a degree. So seeing here means consciously differentiating, not physically perceiving.
Anecdote: I was working in a print shop during university. After a few years of consciously comparing small hue differences, I became almost offended if someone in class talked about a "purple" line in a graph that was clearly magenta to me. I couldn't care less a few years before.
[0] = many parts indirectly, though, e.g. yellow is not a color we can see directly with the cones alone, it is processed first.
That's just about caring or differentiating about relatively small difference. Not about not being able to see the whole color. Which is in the title.
Recently a lot of people forwarded the idea that ancient people couldn't see blue. If you look at Egyptian artefacts, they sure have a lot of symmetrical blue accents. If they really couldn't see the color, then by accident they should have at least at times picked some other color to the left piece than the right piece?
Orange (red-yellow) is a tertiary color. Most tertiary colors are named for things.
Chartreuse (yellow-green) is named for a liquor and was first used in 1764, much more recently than orange.
Azure (blue-cyan) is named for lapis-lazuli.
Rose (magenta-red) is named for the flower.
Turquoise (green-cyan) is named for the gem, with its etymology only in the 17th century.
Violet (magenta-blue) is actually unique in that it's the only tertiary color that isn't named for something. Its name comes from the proto-Indo-European word for purple. (In this case, purple is the color named for a thing).
The process continues for further subdivided color. Most quarternary colors don't have distinct well-accepted names, but some like scarlet, fuschia, and aquamarine are reasonably accepted.
If you've gotten through life calling things yellow-green instead of using the word chartreuse, you know how people got through life without using the word orange.
It's fallen ever more out of use, but when I was young the colour orange was still often called "brandgult" -- "fire-yellow" -- in Swedish. (And the fruit still is an "apelsin".)
That reminds me how my first car was blue-green, or turquoise, to me, but other people would often call it "green". The official color name according to the manufacturer was "Tahitian Green", I think.
Under sodium lights, it would look blue to me, but under other lighting, I considered it to be a blue-green. But it never made any sense to me to consider it primarily green.
Something similar in Irish -- orange was (and still is, among older native speakers in the Gaeltacht) flannbhuí, translating literally as 'blood red yellow'. This is actually the word used for the color on the Irish flag in their constitution.
Then English influence and learners who directly port from English came along and now oráiste, which was originally only the name of the fruit, has replaced it sadly.
I do appreciate the feet-on-the ground research sentiment
"Over the past 20 years, I visited 193 museums in 42 different countries. Equipped with 1,500 Munsell colour chips .. I examined 139,892 works of art, searching for violet. ... there were only .. few artworks before the 1860s"
And the art historical conclusion feels convincing
"in 1864 the influential French art critic Charles Blanc ... described how violet, produced by mixing red and blue, is intensified by placing it next to yellow."
But unfortunately the last paragraph kind of places this immediately into pseudoscientific territory IMO. I wish humanists who do interesting research would not add nonsensical flourish like this:
" I can’t help but wonder whether a muon shower might have enhanced our ability to see violet midway through the 19th century on Earth."
Well, you could mix it from blue and red. But if there are no subjects that are actually violet I presume you lack the incentive to incorporate this color. Violet cloths result in violet subjects etc.
The observation of lack of violet before 19th century is interesting no matter which pedestrian explanation is the most correct one.
This is completely ignoring the fact that for a long time, purple/violet dyes were really rare and expensive. "Royal purple" was called that because only royalty could afford it.
This fact is completely addressed in the article, pointing out that aquamarine and other colors were expensive as well yet it never stopped the artists.
Tyrian purple was way more expensive than ultramarine. It required vast numbers of snails for very small amounts of dye. When royalty couldn't afford it, the production method was lost very quickly.
In addition, I'm pretty sure it didn't have a stable solid form. It also wasn't a particularly stable color (Tyrian purple robes would change color over time).
Both of those, by themselves, would be enough to preclude its use by artists. The cost was just adding insult to injury.
Eh, it's not like kings would use it to paint themselves. Can't see what would prevent it using for commissioned work, a bulk of the art in the old days.
Gold plating your artwork isn't cheap either but was used liberally none the less.
Gold is cheaper than ultramarine, and gold has a very stable solid form as does ultramarine (lapis lazuli).
There also wasn't a lot of point in using the particular Tyrian purple in art as indigo blue and cochineal red were much more prevalent and worked fine as purple in art.
The fact that Tyrian purple was lost is why Roman Catholic Cardinals wear red now instead of purple.
Not read the article yet but commenting while I remember... Prime Minister Gladstone who translated Homer in his spare time, thought that the ancient Greeks, or at least Homer where colour blind. Gladstone said "We have a great deal of difficulty in translating Homer’s colour terms into modern western languages" Homer, apparently had the colour literacy of a modern child, he described oxen as the colour of the sky and described the sea as wine-dark. Though many of Homers colours may just be poetic. Gladstone used to argue with Tennyson, who also translated Homer. They would take turns reading to each other and then debate the relative merits of each other's choices. It takes a poet to read a poet.
To my understanding the strange wording was caused by the requirements of the poetic construct the narration used. So they are filler to make other stuff fit. They are like punctuation. They are not trying to describe colors as such and should not be used as evidence how the people who spun the poem saw colors in psychological sense, I think.
It’s entirely possible the Greek language didn’t have the requisite color words yet. There seems to be a more or less stable order in which languages acquire color terms.
> Berlin and Kay also found that, in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows:
> All languages contain terms for black and white.
If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray.
Exactly so. I updated my comment to try and reflect that. Gladstone took it all too literally and would argue with Tennyson, who was better able to grasp the poetry in Homer.
We know color perception is a very distinct phenomena from the actual frequencies (and mixes of frequencies) of photons from which we perceive color.
So it may be that without a lot of examples of violet in everyday life, that not only human languages, but also our internal perception, may not developmentally adapt to strongly perceive violet.
There would then naturally be a strong reinforcement of violet perceptual blindness, until the scientists’ systematic analysis of color forced greater exposure (in variation and number of incidents) to violet into generating significant perception of violet.
To add: this conjecture seems ready made for a classic reenactment experiment. Sally, requisition the color filter head baskets from cold storage! Fred, please fetch the latest batch of prepped language and vision isolated babies!
So, what is violet actually? WIkipedia says both that it's blue near end of visible spectrum, and then adds that it's mix of blue and red with more blue than red. Those both seem contradictory.
AFAIK human eye doesn't differentiate between wavelenghts of blue, it just compares intensity of whatever triggers its blue cones to whatever triggers its red/green cones, no?
Or, maybe it's the fact that some ranges of ultraviolet trigger all our cones at once?
As I understand it, the cone cells in your retina responsible for "red" have a second peak on the violet-side of blue. This means that a violet wavelength will get efficiently absorbed by both the "blue" and "red" receptors but not the "green" receptors.
That sort of creates a "periodic boundary condition" to colour perception, wrapping a monotonic wavelength spectrum into a colour wheel.
This is also my understanding. The lowest visible frequency is close to half of the highest visible frequency so there might be some harmonics at work in this mechanism.
When I set my LED lights to RGB(0.1,0,1), it looks very much like my blacklights (UV LED, or 405nm lasers. and maybe I should get a tube to compare). I can tell them apart because the physical offset of the R and B LEDs makes a bit of visible fringing, or maybe it's that the single violet photons are coherent (with themselves) whereas the red and blue photons are not, or maybe the retina is a subtler instrument than its simple physical description suggests.
a set of unproven claims !!
I don't know is it science or pseudo-science. It is easy to claim something and make it unprovable by hiding behind x thousand years.
Competing explanations that make as much sense and avoid the need for retarded ideas around recent evolution:
The reason old paintings lack certain pigments is entirely practical i.e availability and or price. Such practical reasons occasionally crystallize into art traditions, even when no longer applicable. The reason old languages rarely used names for colours is because they were less abstract, meaning homer did not say sea was the colour of wine. He said the sea looked like wine. In older translations the emperor garments are as rich ripe plum, not imperial purple. Not that colour or pigment was unknown, it just wasn't used in common speech as it was essentially a technical term mostly used by artists.
Colour looks more like an artifact of language, its accuracy limited by language, rather than a low level visual feature, and as such people are both terrible at communicating what we know. As a result people are terrible at colours, but really only at communicating our understanding of colours, not actually at seeing colours.
This kind of stupidity regarding colour seems to be multiplying, so let me just point to a single experiment you can do yourself to rapidly disabuse yourself of the notion that our perception of colour is distinct from our ability to express colours by name lingually.
Create a simple game where different nuances of colour at the same brightness (use hsv to generate) are shown next to each other. In rgb the difference should be 4 out of 255 levels for one of r,g,b. You receive xp and a pleasing sound whenever you guess correctly proportional to how fast you chose, and you recieve hp damage and a nasty sound and whenever you are wrong, or take longer than 1 second. connect left mouse to the mark the left image, and the right mouse to the right image. Play for an hour or two. You will get better quite quickly. This disproves the idea that we cannot se colours we dont have names for. Further, at least for me, even before doing this I could tell the difference between far more nuances than there are names for colors in a simple grid of hex coded colors. I even remembered where the nuance I wanted was in the grid. Similarly, propose to replace the color pickers modern cg artists use with a dropdown menu of only the colors that there are names for and note how pissy they get.
The same brightness is unfortunately important because both modern screens, modern cameras and artists description of colour fail to account for the simple fact that we have 4 different receptors, not three, and the fourth massively changes how we perceive colours (ever noticed how cameras make everything look redder in low light, unlike your eyes beholding the same scene?). So this compensates for that. Similarly 4 intensity levels aren't the limit of our accuracy, its just the limit of typical modern screens. If you have a high quality ips screen, and haven't messed with the color projection too much, you can lower it further.
There is no scientific consensus on colour, mostly because its ill defined, but we do know definitively what it is not, and the ideas presented in the article are just wrong.
I agree with your general sentiments. The game idea seems a bit much lol, but it could be fun. To me it seems self-evident, but here's another way to convey/understand the idea that we can perceive many unnamed colors (and in the process, name them)...
I don’t think the fact that you can be trained to differentiate a color means you were actively responding to that differentiation prior to being incentivized & systematically exposed to the difference.
Not arguing with your overall point, but that experiment is a weak supporting argument. (Although a strong test for what nuances we can learn to perceive quickly.)
