At least that’s what surveys of adults show. This includes several blue-ish hues like purple and violet. Odds are, you prefer one of those over something in the yellow, red, or green families. We won’t deeply explore the underlying psychology, where reds are off-putting because of an ancient revulsion to blood, fire and other such scarlet signaling that has produced an almost genetic repulsion.
Another reason colors “run deep within us” is a fundamental reality that remains strangely unknown to the vast majority of people. Which is that, on its own, nature has no colors, since light rays are pulses of electricity and magnetism that have neither brightness nor hue. Those energy packets, named photons, each have a specific quantity of invisible energy that excite any of three different cone-shaped retinal cells, which then send signals to the brain’s occipital lobe where images are created and perceived. Moreover, they’re projected to seemingly happen “in front of us” rather than within us, in a realm we’ve been taught to call “the external world.”
Thus, the “external world,” thanks to language and custom, is not only a place deemed to lie outside our bodies and minds, but a realm containing blues and greens that we assume are “really there” rather than internal mental creations caused by biochemical reactions to unseen electromagnetic energies.
Since few of us, even scientists, are aware that colors happen solely in the mind and are strictly an internal phenomenon, we wonder about things like which colors are most prevalent in the cosmos. So knowing this we might more accurately phrase the inquiry as, “what’s the most common electromagnetic energy in the cosmos?” And then learning it’s energy whose waves are spaced roughly 6,000 angstroms apart, we can then say, okay, what color does that commonest energy make us humans perceive? And then get the answer: red.
Let’s now skip such pedantry and merely say that red is nature’s favorite color. Far more stars are reddish than bluish. And there are no greenish stars. When it comes to glowing gases or nebulae, here again red dominates the scene, since nature’s most abundant element, hydrogen, reliably emits that color when excited by the ultraviolet emissions from nearby stars.
It is true that green-glows are seen here and there whenever oxygen is excited, such as in the aurora borealis. But in the universe, it’s second fiddle to hydrogen’s crimson.
One should also remember that sunlight appears white because that’s what humans perceive when we simultaneously see all colors. White is a rainbow in a blender. So here in the Hudson Valley, with summer’s glorious hues now emerging, we can grasp what’s really going on. The sudden profusion of green all around us is not caused by grass and leaves and chlorophyll loving green or having a green tint. That color’s dominance actually demonstrates the fact that chlorophyll, and your front lawn containing it, hate green. The chlorophyll molecule makes energy for the plant by utilizing sunlight, but that molecule does its work when struck by solar blue or red light. Despite being the Sun’s strongest emission, green is not useful to chlorophyll, so it reflects those wavelengths away while absorbing the other colors. Hence your lawn appears green not because grass loves that color but because it rejects it!
With a little knowledge we can appreciate the visible realm in a new way. One that’s a bit strange, but reveals the secrets of what’s actually happening.
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