Look at all the colors on the screen of your television or computer monitor. There are millions of different shades and hues, right? Well, actually there are only three. Red, green, and blue.
To see this, you will need:
- a color television or computer monitor
- a little water
Dip your finger in the water and put a small drop of water on the TV screen. Look at the drop. You should see bright red, green, and blue in the drop. The water is acting as a magnifying glass, showing you the tiny phosphor dots that make up the picture.
But wait a minute! How can all those colors come from those three? And I remember from the first grade that the primary colors are red, blue, and yellow, not green. The difference lies in what you are mixing to get the colors. In the first grade, we were mixing paints and pigments. With the TV, we are mixing light. There is a big difference.
When we mix red and green pigments, we get a brownish color, but when we mix red and green light, we get YELLOW. If we add all the pigments together, we get black, but if we mix all the colors of light, we get white. While at first this does not make much sense, it gets clearer as we think about it. Red pigment looks red because it absorbs the other colors and only reflects the red light. If we mix all the pigments, they soak up all the colors and we get black.
If you are using your computer monitor, you can use your painting program to make blocks of different colors and look at them through the water drop, to see how each color is produced.
Have a wonder-filled week.
