JH Impossible Colors
If you can’t see a color, does it cease to exist?
The answer is maybe….
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From "A Dictionary of Colour Combinations," 1933-34, Haishoku Soukan.
The human eye can see – or register – nearly one million different colors (!). This is all thanks to our built-in photoreceptors, or cones, that are each responsible for detecting wavelengths in the visible spectrum.
An “impossible” color complicates this fact... i.e. there are real biological reasons why some colors are only perceptible in certain circumstances, or by certain people, when they wouldn’t be otherwise.
Color spectrum presented in a circle from “The Enjoyment and Use of Color,” 1924.
Shades of White, Wikipedia Commons.
Example 1: The Purkinje Effect
A sensitivity toward the blue end of the color spectrum when adjusting to low levels of light, like the blue light of morning, or how snow “looks" at dusk vs. the height of noon.
Chimerical Color Demo Template from "Chimerical Colors: Some phenomenological Predictions from Cognitive Neuroscience," in Philosophical Psychology, 2005. Wikipedia Commons.
Example 2: Chimerical colors
A kind of optical illusion or " imaginary color that can be seen temporarily by looking steadily at a strong color and then looking at a markedly different color.”
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While some colors are impossible because they’re elusive, others simply have no basis in our material reality — they may be impossible because they’re fictional...
Fig. 18 “Vague Intellectual Pleasure” from Project Gutenberg's Thought-forms by Annie Besant C.W.
"Sometimes at the birth and death of a day, the opal sky is no color we have words for, the gold shading into blue without the intervening green that is halfway between those colors, the fiery warm colors that are not apricot or crimson or gold, the light morphing second by second so that the sky is more shades of blue than you can count as it fades from where the sun is to the far side where other colors are happening.”
— “Recollections of My Nonexistence” by Rebecca Solnit
Image generated from research scientist Janelle Shane.
Lastly, LOL at this AI bot’s rendition on paint names for valid RGB values.
