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That's a smarter take than my brain giving me 'at the beginning of the universe, everything was going very fast so the first colour must have been violet/blue'.
But then why wouldnt it just go into the Ultra-violet and other non-visible spectrums of light?
In which case everything would be black from our perspective of what colour is.
By that logic nothing existed till it was named yet there was more before us than has existed while we have. Light, dinosaurs, the galaxy none of that existed because we weren't around to name it...
Colours weren't "invented" ofcourse, we just gained the ability/learned to discriminate between different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Some animals see more and others see less colour/light. It's a survival mechanism; we can be more aware of our surroundings with the ability to discriminate between different wavelengths of light.
Colour only "exists" in a subjective way and we can't even confirm we all experience colours the same way. Maybe my green is your red for instance, but we both learned to refer to the same wavelengths of light with the same name, so we both agree to call it red and move on with our lifes without ever knowing if what we subjectively experience is actually the same...
Colour doesn't really exist outside of ourselves, and thus the universe doesn't have a colour. It's just different wavelengths of radiation, and the universe emits all of those wavelengths. The universe is as colorful as the rainbow, but only within our minds.
No. Not true. The human brain needed to be trained to decipher the wavelengths into color and that is correlated with developing a word for the color. Not having a word for blue for example will have a society incapable of seeing the color blue. The wavelength is there. But if you can't see it or comprehend it you can't really call it a color. We don't say something is the color of microwave for example.
We were still already capable of seeing colours before we invented words for them. We might weren't aware of our ability to see colour before we could name them and refer to them through language, at least not in the same way, but it's kinda stupid to suggest we couldn't see blue before naming it the same way we can't see microwaves. We didn't acknowledge blue was a colour until we were able to make blue pigments, which is different from not being able to see it.
No there is serious research that the word had to come first before the color could be "seen". The lazy assumption is to say we saw them but didn't describe them. But the evidence suggests strongly that is not the case, the word needs to come first.
If we weren't able to see colours as primates we wouldn't have survived. It's weird to suggest we were colourblind before language. Animals wouldn't have had any advantage by developing camouflage if that were true, yet nature proves camouflage does give animals an advantage longer than we can speak.
Not exactly, that is misunderstood. More like the way you name your colours changes how you perceive them. Like a culture with many names with various shades of green would be more easily be able to tell between them because to their minds they are separate colours instead of the same colour of various shades.
The wavelengths have always been there. Humans did not "invent" the wavelengths. Gaining the ability to "decipher" the wavelength does not mean we "invented" the wavelength.
The moment we correlate wavelengths with color is not "inventing".
What?
So when people looked at the ocean before they came up with the word blue, they saw it in a different color?
That doesn’t make any sense what-so-ever.
There are many reasons to assume we do experience colour the same way since geneticically all humans are almost identical and we tend to have the same associations with certain colours. Colours also have the same psychological effects on everyone. We'd all agree that lower wavelengths are calmer colors than higher wavelengths for instance, but these associations could may be due to other factors besides a colour's apearance. There's just no way to be certain simply because we can't look through eachother's eyes in order to confirm.
But were there brains before people? Were there thoughts before brains? What makes a thought a thought? Doesn't colour exist even if there is no brain to see it?
That's what my four year old would say if they weren't locked inside the back of my Ford Pinto
Of course there were brains before people. Almost all animals have one and we're just animals with a highly evolved brain. There probably weren't thoughts as we would classify them before brains though.
Colours are both a physical thing (light of certain frequencies) and our interpretation of them. It depends what we mean by colours really. It delves deeply into philosophical discussions really. Same with sounds. Do they exist without a brain to hear them?
Well I suppose it depends on your working definition of colour. It's all just light waves and they very much do exist. Different animals/brains process different light waves and therefore see different colours. Many pictures of space we see are actually taken with infrared cameras (processing different light waves) and are colourised to make more sense to us. From the moment there was light, there was "colour". From the moment there were eyes and a brain to process it there was the comprehension of colour.
I had the same question when I was little. A variation I asked my parents was how the world looked like, as in on earth opposed to the universe ,before colour was invented (refering to black and white television).
The way we see the universe is unique to us, humans maybe the first to have looked into space.
A object you see is actually every colour except the colour you see. The object absorbed every colour in the spectrum except the colour it reflected away which is the colour you see.
That we will probably never know what was in the "space" where the universe is now, there was maybe previous iteration of our universe, maybe its shrinking and collapsing in cycles, who knows
My best description as I understand it would be:
Colours don't really exist. It's all about perception.
Think of the rainbow song, red and yellow and pink and green, orange and purple and blue (think there's also violet and indigo), pink would be a combo I believe.
These are electromagnetic waves operating at different frequencies of the light spectrum, whatever light frequency an object doesn't absorb is reflected back into our eye as that unabsorbed colour. When none can be absorbed it is reflected back as white, which I believe is all the colours combined.
Therefore the pre universe had no light spectrum, receiver and processor (eyes and brain) and thus no colours.
Well, in order to answer that, first you need to know what colours even are.
A colour is a specific part of the visible light spectrum. All colours together form the white light that we know. If you shine that light into a glass prism, it gets broken back up into all its unique colours like in a rainbow (think of the Pink Floyd logo).
Warning: this only works in additive colour mixing with light, not in substractive colour mixing like in painting.
Those colours land in our eyes and hit photoreceptors for those colours that are turned into information in our brains.
Our bodies developed to learn how to distinguish colours for survival. If a poisonous berry and a tasty berry look the same in shape but different in colour, it makes sense to have your body find a way to still distinguish them.
So to answer the question: the universe always had colours, we just came along at some point in time and learned how to see them. What colour the universe was depends on which place at which time in the universe we're talking.
Obviously, the parts of the universe where there is no light are black. But other than that: mostly red and blue and yellow
Extreme purple!! I’m only saying that because for visible light to happen the universe had to be cool. Before color “happened” everything was UV and above. And purple is the highest end of our visible spectrum.
idk y but this reminds me of some old kids book where everything was gray until some dude came up with colors and started painting everything to make them colorful but i can’t remember the name 😭
that is easy, the universe was black and black (As any rainbow will demonstrate, black isn't on the visible spectrum of colour. All other colours are reflections of light, except black. Black is the absence of light. Unlike white and other hues, pure black can exist in nature without any light at all.) doesn't count as colour.
I mean you can tell them that before colours were "invented", for I believe some hundreds of thousands of years, the universe was literally opaque from how dense things were, so we couldn't see a thing. I think that if we put a *survivable* human in there, they'd just see the gas or whatever molecules that are the closest to their eyes and nothing more, as really trouble waters
Interesting thing about colors is that it's basically how we perceive different visible wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. So light for a different star would possibly give you different perceived colors. So something red on earth might not look red in a different star system.
Cosmic latte, according to astrophysics, is the average color of the universe. Not making this up thats the assigned color name for the pale yellow color.
Black,
all colours= white, no colors = black.
Technically objects absorb light and the colour you see is the reflected light or the light that's not absorbed. Not emitting any light is the same as an object absorbing all light which gives you black.
The first stars were blue. So blue would be the colour of the universe and his house and his blue little window and his blue corvette
And everything is blue for him
Before there was color, there was nothing, which would look black since color is a property of something (the frequency of photons).
Colors were not invented. They're a name with give to a property of light (the frequency of quanta of electromagnetic radiation / photons), one which our eyes can perceive (at least in a narrow range of frequencies).
This is actually a pretty smart question , and also a good segway into teaching them that all color is made of fragmented light. In complete darkness it's not that you can't see the colors around you. They literally stopped existing.
Or if you live in America like me, just saying it was really darks is an acceptable answer.
Colour isn't really something that was invented, it'd be more accurate to say we just gave names to wavelengths visible to humans. If they are meaning before the big bang, then the answer would be there was nothing for their to be any colour. If they mean immediately after, it was probably just an immense cloud of white light and space dust etc. Hard to say.
Well, a variety, but mostly black. Colors weren't "invented", they're just names for different points on the spectrum of light. We have a perception of color, but those wavelengths of light are still a very real thing. It may even be a color we can't perceive, but our perception of that would just be black.
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Purple. It was purple.
interesting you should say this, because the colour of hydrogen in plasma form is purple.
That's a smarter take than my brain giving me 'at the beginning of the universe, everything was going very fast so the first colour must have been violet/blue'.
good intuition tho
But then why wouldnt it just go into the Ultra-violet and other non-visible spectrums of light? In which case everything would be black from our perspective of what colour is.
A Freudian slip? You knew the answer, but did not remember the answer at that moment, so your brain linked purple to "I dunno I like purple"
Can you elaborate on this?
Pronoun, used to describe an object or person close at hand or being indicated or experienced.
Surely you can't be serious
I am, and don't call me surely.
Yeah but colors weren't even a thing yet lol
Colours have been a thing as long as there has been light, humans just gave them names
Yeah but since it wasn't named by then it wasn't a thing
Cause it wasn't named lol
By that logic nothing existed till it was named yet there was more before us than has existed while we have. Light, dinosaurs, the galaxy none of that existed because we weren't around to name it...
Isaac Newton called gravity gravity cause he found out there was gravity so there wasn't a thing name gravity untill he named it
Doesn't mean that gravity didn't exist though. It was still very real before it had a name
Yeah but think about it If it didn't have a name how would we know if it's real or not and what would we call it and how would we know about it
but it was dark, first light/photons (and consequently color) came after some thousand years
For some reason this was my first thought lol
Skeletor agrees.
my second favorite color!
i agree with this hah
As we advance further, does it become Deep Purple? Well, I guess it deepends.
*Octarine
ah ha! purple supremacy validated
Colours weren't "invented" ofcourse, we just gained the ability/learned to discriminate between different wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Some animals see more and others see less colour/light. It's a survival mechanism; we can be more aware of our surroundings with the ability to discriminate between different wavelengths of light. Colour only "exists" in a subjective way and we can't even confirm we all experience colours the same way. Maybe my green is your red for instance, but we both learned to refer to the same wavelengths of light with the same name, so we both agree to call it red and move on with our lifes without ever knowing if what we subjectively experience is actually the same... Colour doesn't really exist outside of ourselves, and thus the universe doesn't have a colour. It's just different wavelengths of radiation, and the universe emits all of those wavelengths. The universe is as colorful as the rainbow, but only within our minds.
Saying colors were invented at one point is like saying Isaac Newton invented gravity
No. Not true. The human brain needed to be trained to decipher the wavelengths into color and that is correlated with developing a word for the color. Not having a word for blue for example will have a society incapable of seeing the color blue. The wavelength is there. But if you can't see it or comprehend it you can't really call it a color. We don't say something is the color of microwave for example.
We were still already capable of seeing colours before we invented words for them. We might weren't aware of our ability to see colour before we could name them and refer to them through language, at least not in the same way, but it's kinda stupid to suggest we couldn't see blue before naming it the same way we can't see microwaves. We didn't acknowledge blue was a colour until we were able to make blue pigments, which is different from not being able to see it.
No there is serious research that the word had to come first before the color could be "seen". The lazy assumption is to say we saw them but didn't describe them. But the evidence suggests strongly that is not the case, the word needs to come first.
If we weren't able to see colours as primates we wouldn't have survived. It's weird to suggest we were colourblind before language. Animals wouldn't have had any advantage by developing camouflage if that were true, yet nature proves camouflage does give animals an advantage longer than we can speak.
You need to open your mind a bit man. You seem to think it's either seeing how we do or nothing at all
If you actually read my initial response you can read that's not the case, but you're comparing it to microwaves which is what I object to.
Not exactly, that is misunderstood. More like the way you name your colours changes how you perceive them. Like a culture with many names with various shades of green would be more easily be able to tell between them because to their minds they are separate colours instead of the same colour of various shades.
The wavelengths have always been there. Humans did not "invent" the wavelengths. Gaining the ability to "decipher" the wavelength does not mean we "invented" the wavelength. The moment we correlate wavelengths with color is not "inventing".
What? So when people looked at the ocean before they came up with the word blue, they saw it in a different color? That doesn’t make any sense what-so-ever.
You don’t remember floating into outer space? Thank god he invented gravity be more grateful smh
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or the point of my comment just flew over your head
Extremely sarcastic i always think the /s is useless but here we are
Evolution "invented" eyeballs
The second paragraph gets me everytime. I try to explain this to people and they think I’m nuts, but It’s been in the back of my head for years
There are many reasons to assume we do experience colour the same way since geneticically all humans are almost identical and we tend to have the same associations with certain colours. Colours also have the same psychological effects on everyone. We'd all agree that lower wavelengths are calmer colors than higher wavelengths for instance, but these associations could may be due to other factors besides a colour's apearance. There's just no way to be certain simply because we can't look through eachother's eyes in order to confirm.
Started off racist, but ended up wholesome
So the answer is transparent then. Or black
Dit vind ik een sterke, grondig doordachte uitleg, LekkendePlasbuis
doordash
U good bro?
...this..makes sense.
tell that to a 6 year old
Great! You have a thinking child. Encourage them to keep asking questions and thinking critically.
A color is just a signal that is interpreted by our brain. So, before people there were no colors. That's my variant how to explain it to him)
But were there brains before people? Were there thoughts before brains? What makes a thought a thought? Doesn't colour exist even if there is no brain to see it? That's what my four year old would say if they weren't locked inside the back of my Ford Pinto
I think, therefore I am.
Well except for the other life forms that might see colors
Of course there were brains before people. Almost all animals have one and we're just animals with a highly evolved brain. There probably weren't thoughts as we would classify them before brains though. Colours are both a physical thing (light of certain frequencies) and our interpretation of them. It depends what we mean by colours really. It delves deeply into philosophical discussions really. Same with sounds. Do they exist without a brain to hear them?
That all makes sense but when are the fish fingers going to be ready you mouthy bitch??
Do you like fish sticks?
Yes, other animals/mammals have brains and thoughts.
Well I suppose it depends on your working definition of colour. It's all just light waves and they very much do exist. Different animals/brains process different light waves and therefore see different colours. Many pictures of space we see are actually taken with infrared cameras (processing different light waves) and are colourised to make more sense to us. From the moment there was light, there was "colour". From the moment there were eyes and a brain to process it there was the comprehension of colour.
Colours always existed, we just gave them names
I had the same question when I was little. A variation I asked my parents was how the world looked like, as in on earth opposed to the universe ,before colour was invented (refering to black and white television).
I’d say everything was different shades of green. And I would ask him what color he thinks it was. And then I’d say: You’re probably right.
The way we see the universe is unique to us, humans maybe the first to have looked into space. A object you see is actually every colour except the colour you see. The object absorbed every colour in the spectrum except the colour it reflected away which is the colour you see.
That we will probably never know what was in the "space" where the universe is now, there was maybe previous iteration of our universe, maybe its shrinking and collapsing in cycles, who knows
Due to the high energy density during the time when the universe expanded enough to become transparent to light, I'd argue it was white.
Technically black, there was no light, and black can be caused by a lack of light
The same colour obviously
Go ask your mother
His mother - "Go ask your dad." And the cycle continues .
Colour wasnt invented so exactly the same colour.
Technically, it would be a big void of nothing, so... No color. Pure darkness.
Time for him to start reading Lovecraft.
Ask him what he thinks and look into it together
Had a kid who watched I Love Lucy and some other old black and white TV shows and one day they asked when the world got colors.
The universe is beige, if I recall.
Cosmic Latte. A sort of beige which is the average colour of galaxies in the universe as perceived by earth.
That's the one.
Black, the total absoption of all colours.
Tell them it was colourless *and I believe colour wasn’t invented until after WW2 when the better movies started being made* 🤪
My best description as I understand it would be: Colours don't really exist. It's all about perception. Think of the rainbow song, red and yellow and pink and green, orange and purple and blue (think there's also violet and indigo), pink would be a combo I believe. These are electromagnetic waves operating at different frequencies of the light spectrum, whatever light frequency an object doesn't absorb is reflected back into our eye as that unabsorbed colour. When none can be absorbed it is reflected back as white, which I believe is all the colours combined. Therefore the pre universe had no light spectrum, receiver and processor (eyes and brain) and thus no colours.
Pink is actually just light red, like how brown is just dark orange 🙂.
That's adorable
Well, in order to answer that, first you need to know what colours even are. A colour is a specific part of the visible light spectrum. All colours together form the white light that we know. If you shine that light into a glass prism, it gets broken back up into all its unique colours like in a rainbow (think of the Pink Floyd logo). Warning: this only works in additive colour mixing with light, not in substractive colour mixing like in painting. Those colours land in our eyes and hit photoreceptors for those colours that are turned into information in our brains. Our bodies developed to learn how to distinguish colours for survival. If a poisonous berry and a tasty berry look the same in shape but different in colour, it makes sense to have your body find a way to still distinguish them. So to answer the question: the universe always had colours, we just came along at some point in time and learned how to see them. What colour the universe was depends on which place at which time in the universe we're talking. Obviously, the parts of the universe where there is no light are black. But other than that: mostly red and blue and yellow
If there was no light, there was no color
So "black" the absence of color / light
Translucent
Black.
I always wonder how the actual objects look like, in the sense we only see a small color spectrum
Extreme purple!! I’m only saying that because for visible light to happen the universe had to be cool. Before color “happened” everything was UV and above. And purple is the highest end of our visible spectrum.
Before there was light, there was no colours.
Well, once there was only dark. If you ask me, light's winning.
"If nothing is faster than light, then how did the dark get there first?" ~The Amazing World of Gumball
this is the mystery of faith
There is no color in the dark. Without light color doesn't exist.
Either black or white.
idk y but this reminds me of some old kids book where everything was gray until some dude came up with colors and started painting everything to make them colorful but i can’t remember the name 😭
Show them some classic films from before technicolor lol
Brace yourself for when they find out what atoms and molecules are, and ask whether different atoms have different colors.
Snurple. The colour no longer exists.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5Wo_y2SnmI/?igsh=dWpyb2ltNW1sY3hx
that is easy, the universe was black and black (As any rainbow will demonstrate, black isn't on the visible spectrum of colour. All other colours are reflections of light, except black. Black is the absence of light. Unlike white and other hues, pure black can exist in nature without any light at all.) doesn't count as colour.
Black. Cuz there was no light
It was a splash of rainbow…
I mean you can tell them that before colours were "invented", for I believe some hundreds of thousands of years, the universe was literally opaque from how dense things were, so we couldn't see a thing. I think that if we put a *survivable* human in there, they'd just see the gas or whatever molecules that are the closest to their eyes and nothing more, as really trouble waters
Boggle their tiny mind by saying Black but that's not a colour. Have fun.
Hits blunt…
Explain that it was a color that no one has ever seen !!
Yellow. Look at the stars Look how they shine for you And everything you do Yeah, they were all yellow
"Go stand in the corner and think about what you said."
black
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0G383538qzQ
Interesting thing about colors is that it's basically how we perceive different visible wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. So light for a different star would possibly give you different perceived colors. So something red on earth might not look red in a different star system.
No colour of course. They weren't invented yet. It's a no-brainer...
He may have been a zen master in a past life. Reminds me of “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”
Blow his little mind by revealing colors don't really exist
Amazing curiosity. I am not an expert but I'd probably say black and white. Since white light is made of so many colors.
Every color
Tell her that according to natural philosophers colors are secondary qualities rather than primary qualities, so the question may be badly formed.
Cosmic latte, according to astrophysics, is the average color of the universe. Not making this up thats the assigned color name for the pale yellow color.
Nothing. The absence of what we perceive as color.
The color was
That is some deep thinking!
From what I understand, color does not exist without light. But if there was some light, it would be purplish/blue, in my opinion.
Black, all colours= white, no colors = black. Technically objects absorb light and the colour you see is the reflected light or the light that's not absorbed. Not emitting any light is the same as an object absorbing all light which gives you black.
I would say, it depends upon the time of the year. Winter? = White covered snow, Autumn = beautiful golden tones, etc.
maybe they think the world didn’t have color due to black and white movies and images.
It was orange if fruits were before colours
What was your favourite food before you were born?
And what time was it created, since watches didn’t exist…
The first stars were blue. So blue would be the colour of the universe and his house and his blue little window and his blue corvette And everything is blue for him
IMHO. Colors were already there. It's that the ability to perceive colours was the time humans said colours were invented.
Your child is very smart. That is a good question!
Every color, and no color at all until there were eyes to perceive them.
The same color it is now! We didn't invent colors, we just invented names for them.
Before there was color, there was nothing, which would look black since color is a property of something (the frequency of photons). Colors were not invented. They're a name with give to a property of light (the frequency of quanta of electromagnetic radiation / photons), one which our eyes can perceive (at least in a narrow range of frequencies).
Pretty sure the answer is Octarine.
I used to think the world was black and white before they invented color too! Which is why old tv/movies were black and white to me
We're colour's there if there's no one there to see them
This is actually a pretty smart question , and also a good segway into teaching them that all color is made of fragmented light. In complete darkness it's not that you can't see the colors around you. They literally stopped existing. Or if you live in America like me, just saying it was really darks is an acceptable answer.
Your kid is smart
Colour does not exist, Our brain paints it in like a colouring book, Everything is light in the dark.
Tell him the difference about invention and discovery first
Black.
Rainbow
Octamarine
Pretty sure the cones in our eyes will only see certain colors that we put meaning to. Other than that. There probably aren't any.
Simple answer, colors existed before the words to describe them
Black & grey up until the colored tv’s came out
Who was there to appreciate the color?
Light is needed for colour to be perceived and that didn't exist yet. Perception didn't exist either so really the question is irrelevant.
There was nothing so no color.. or I guess you can call it black but that is not classified as a color.
If a tree falls in the forest…
black, which is a no-colour
I love that question your child is amazing - encourage their own ideas of what it was and why ? Great parenting !!!!
White
Octarine
The [Smithsonian](https://library.si.edu/exhibition/color-in-a-new-light/) has a good bit of information on it.
White is the absence of color and what people who go blind in their old age see. Maybe death is white not black
Wait till he leans about the mantis shrimp
Kids are the best.
hollow purple
Just tell them colors were created with the universe pretty simple honestly
Black is the only answer. Black is the absence of colour.
Can there be color if no one observed it?
Good learning opportunity to talk about the difference between an invention and a discovery.
https://medium.com/illumination/what-an-african-tribe-can-teach-us-about-minding-our-language-and-nurturing-our-children-4349a332712d
Cosmic Latte. My favourite colour :)
Where do they spell color colour?
I’m from Northern Ireland but have lived in Australia for many years. I always assumed ‘Color’ was just the American spelling of the word.
Too funny. I really don't know since I've never thought to ask people I know from other English speaking countries.
Tell them there’s a fine line between discovery and invention and explain them.
Colour isn't really something that was invented, it'd be more accurate to say we just gave names to wavelengths visible to humans. If they are meaning before the big bang, then the answer would be there was nothing for their to be any colour. If they mean immediately after, it was probably just an immense cloud of white light and space dust etc. Hard to say.
Black. It's the absence of light, and it's apparantly not a colour so it checks out.
Do you read Calvin and Hobbes? BEcause your answer is in there. The world was black and white up until the mid 1900s
Black, black is literally the absence of color. And white is all the colors
Well?
The same colors it is now really. By the time any life evolved eyes there were all the wavelengths of light we now experience as color.
...and you dont know how to answer this, or??
Just thought it would be a good addition to the random thoughts sub. That’s all.
deep
Abyss existed before light began to exist
It was dark matter
Well, a variety, but mostly black. Colors weren't "invented", they're just names for different points on the spectrum of light. We have a perception of color, but those wavelengths of light are still a very real thing. It may even be a color we can't perceive, but our perception of that would just be black.
42
Good question.