Scientists Create New Colors of the Rainbow

[rodsky]

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First off, this is a copy of my recent blog entry (and a slight modification of my FB status message). But for purposes of discussion in the science section, I shall pull out the actual news item from the bottom, all the way here to the top.


Very recently, a team of physicists from the University of California at Santa Barbara just announced that they have been able to (as a form of "side effect") create 11 new colors of the rainbow using lasers and ion cascades, a report from the Science Daily says, a link to which is here:

Ripping electrons from their cores: Physicists mix two lasers to create light at many frequencies


Now let's read an excerpt from "The Gods of Mars", a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, part of his John Carter series of novels (yes, in case you only knew about the name John Carter from the recent movie, the John Carter character has been around for ages--well, specifically since 1912, which in fact tells us that this fictitious character is already 100 years old), the adventures of John Carter in Barsoom (Mars).



"The stone worn by the thern who confronted us was of about the same size as that which I had seen before; an inch in diameter I should say. It scintillated nine different and distinct rays; the seven primary colors of our earthly prism and the two rays which are unknown upon Earth, but whose wonderous beauty is indescribable."

Before we continue, I would like to add that I think what Burroughs meant by the term "seven primary colors" are in fact, the seven colors of the rainbow, which we were taught as kids with the funny-sounding yet handy acronym of "ROYGBIV", which stands for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet.

Now, the eminent astronomer Carl Sagan mentions to us, in his book BROCA'S BRAIN, that when he read the John Carter novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs as a kid, try as hard as he might, he couldn't picture these two additional primary colors, and since he believed the full electromagnetic spectrum to be "permanent" and unchanging, that this is another "bending of known physics" that Burroughs did, to satisfy his description of something unearthly, something truly fantastic and beyond the scope of whatever ordinary things we experience here on earth--artistic license or allowance, if you will--when he wrote the novels.



But I can't help but think, especially noting the manner by which Sagan mentioned this fact in the book, that he believed that Burroughs wasn't "trained enough" in the sciences to actually know better. Or was Sagan judging Burroughs too early?

Well, I think in a way, Edgar Rice Burroughs musings wasn't that far from the truth, don't you think?

Now, try it yourself--can you actually picture 11 new hues of the rainbow? While they may not have an actual photo yet of these new colors, primary or not, I think that Burroughs may have had more insight into the matter than previously thought--or was it just a wild guess? You decide.

-RODION

[personalmgt]

Kind of boozy right now and just read a few of the parts although I got the point.

I remember on science class back in freshmen high school when we were watching a documentary about optics. Before the film ended, it asked a question if there are still colors to be invented. We jokingly answered "brown blue!", "blue-green-red?", "pink green!"

Well obviously, no one made sense. But to see this point of time, that question wasn't just ridiculing everyone of us in that class.

Recovering from digression, I doubt we'll see this in a few months, perhaps years to a max of 5. It's not easy to incorporate these things especially to the one that you are staring right now, a monitor. Well it is easy, the process may just take time.

My guess on the process would be something like this, chronologically:
-Get it on paper
-Take a shot of the color, but before that, the camera must recognize the color. This may mean having an RnD team to work on a sensor that understands this.
-Rewrite the libraries that common image format uses, because you can't just slap in a new color there. This cascades also to applications that use it (e.g. photoshop, mspaint, gimp, etc...). QA will also take a toll on time for this.
-Going back to the RnD for a camera, this also asks for monitors and TVs to be reworked so these new colors would appear. Our current display units are not capable yet of displaying these colors so it may take time (read: 5 years or decades) for the new displays to be deployed around the world.. We have cheap people around that don't upgrade their displays/TVs :\
-Everybody starts making material out of it like films and photos.
-Then we'll have movies like "On bluray new colors!" or "On our new color channel!". Hope the new colors won't be monetized.

Basically, its like back in the technicolor days when everybody transitioned from B&W to RGB. The very first time you'll see these new colors would be, in crayons.

But this is again, me paraphrasing, just a wild guess. So don't be all jolly.

[xco0ter]

i hope a tetrachromat will show up

[seuss]

thanks for sharing.

[THE SKULLS]

more colors, more banwidth. yeah.

[crazybenz12]

slamat kaau sag pahibalu ug share