The light that we see, also known as visible light, is a combination of many different waves, each of a different length. When we see an object, our brain is interpreting the data of the light waves that bounce off a surface and interact with our eyes.
A wave travels just as you would picture it, with a peak and a trough, like so:
The wavelength is the distance between each wave like the one shown above. Essentially each different color our eyes can see is a wave of a different length. Our eyes can distinguish between these wavelengths of light and interpret them as different colors like so:
I drew colored lines across the wavelength for each color. This is our visible light spectrum. We cannot see electromagnetic waves above and below these wavelengths.
When you combine all these colors of light they became white. This is how additive color works:
So the light coming from our sun, is a combination of all these different wavelengths of visible light (and many wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum that are not visible).
But for those of us who are not color blind, everything we see has a color. We see the color of an object because when this light hits an object, some of the wavelengths get absorbed and some get reflected back to us for our eyes to see. Take a red apple for example. It is not necessarily that the apple itself is red, as much as the apple absorbs most of the wavelengths that are not red, and reflects the red wavelengths so we see red. So, in reality, a red apple actually absorbs every color of light except red. These combinations of different absorption and reflections of the different wavelengths are what give us all of the seven million different colors that the human eye can perceive. Pretty amazing.
And now that we understand how light and color works, one step closer to understanding life, the universe and everything.
Further info and links:
NASA on Color
Visible Light via NASA
Additive Color Mixing via Phillips Lighting
Vantablack Video via Surrey Nanosystems
Color Theory via Worqx
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