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(11) Take That, Newton!
Once I could account for what happens when we mix orange and green light, I could see that virtually the same phenomenon occurs when we mix the two as pigments--with the exception that with pigments, a unit of white is subtracted out rather than added in. What we get is actually yellow--only so dark that we don't recognize it for what it is.
(Again, we wouldn't normally recognize the color as yellow even if it stayed on the same value level as the orange and green with which we started. And with the downward "register shift," this color is so far down the value scale as to be all but unrecognizable even as dark brown.)
Moreover, I found that once I could explain what happens when "red" and green are additively or subtractively mixed, I could follow the same sort of equation to explain virtually every other admixture.
In other words, just as the paper in the Cal Tech library had said, I seemed to have found a different set of primaries that worked just as well as the RBG triad more commonly used among contemporary physicists.
Then it occurred to me that the situation held a good deal more promise.
After all, the set of primaries that I had used to explain additive admixtures was the same set that is routinely used by the printing industry in subtractive color interactions. And when a single explanation is valid for multiple phenomena, isn't it normally considered more scientifically desirable--at least from the standpoint of being more logically elegant--than multiple explanations for the same phenomena?© COPYRIGHT 1993 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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