(5) Ambushed by the Received Truth

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In the physics text I found everything I knew (or thought I knew) contradicted--and replaced by what seemed like the purest nonsense.

For starters, the red that was shown as a primary color was not the "true visual red" that had taken me so much effort to discover.  It was ordinary layman's-terminology firetruck red.  "Who are these guys?" I thought.   "How could they not know about red what every neighborhood print shop knows?"

More disturbing, the triad of primary colors was said to consist of red, blue, and green.

Green as a primary?  To me, this sounded about as sensible as trying to call peanut-butter-and-jelly an element.  The thing couldn't possibly have been any more plainly compound in nature.  Green?  Every acne-ridden wretch who had ever sat through a high school art class knew how to make green--from blue and yellow!

Meanwhile, what was this business about blue and green combining to make blue-green?   Granted, that was the color you actually got;  but why wasn't anybody picking up on how limited the whole transaction was?  It was like saying that purple was a primary, and that when combined with red, it produced red-purple.

And then there was yellow.  Or rather, then there wasn’t yellow.   What had they gone and done with it?  After all my hard work to understand yellow, given its prominence in the natural world (especially in its deeper shades), it was as if somebody had just decided it wasn't important enough to bother with.

But whenever they decided they did need it, just how in the world did they propose to get it back?

When I read that yellow could be produced by mixing red and green, I found the proposition preposterous and revolting.  I might as well have been reading a recipe for a beer milk shake.  I closed the book and went home.

© COPYRIGHT 1993 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.