What Is the Average Color of the Universe? | Hacker News Reader

What Is the Average Color of the Universe?

priceonomics.com

It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring.

The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.

Someone told me red is shorter so we see it faster -- is there any biological evidence for this?

I don't think so, red has a smaller wavelength than the other colors we see, but I don't think that could translate into us seeing it faster (whatever that even means).

It's pretty rare to see red in nature that isn't blood or fire, and when you do it's often on dangerous things (like those frogs in the amazon). Maybe red is so striking to us because red things in nature are things we need to pay attention to?

Red actually has a larger wavelength. Red is at ~600 nm, while green and blue are at ~500nm and ~400nm respectively. Red has a lower frequency though.

Not sure about the biology, but there is some evidence from physics for this.

The speed of light is constant in a vacuum, but different for different wavelengths in a medium. This is why shining white light through a glass prism causes it to disperse into many colors -- they each travel through the medium at slightly different speeds. Interestingly, the refractive index (how much the light slows down in a medium) is higher for larger wavelengths like red in the color spectrum. So technically, red light travels slower than blue or green light in a medium (eg. air, water etc.).

Of course I would delays in this would be absolutely tiny compared to delays due to neural processing .... but hey who knows, maybe we can tell the difference!

Shouldn't it be boring kind of by definition? I mean the whole concept of "boring" comes from describing something that is mundane, accessible and ubiquitous.

If it is statistically most common, then it is the most prevalent and thus not novel whatsoever and therefore boring.

This tells us one of two things:

1. We should be excited that we understand the universe so well that we have determined the most common thing and we represent that so often

2. More likely this is anthropomorphizing the universe around the narrow receptors of visible light

It's boring because it's not a "pure" color, as it must be a mix of different wavelengths that is weighted similar to what get to the surface of earth from sun. So it's boring in the same sense a white noise is boring -- it has little information. On the other hand, a more pure color means there must be something that is changing the sun's light as it reflects it, or it's emitting light of some specific wavelength, which has more information.

Or put it simply, it's the color of dirt, and dirt is boring.

The vast majority of mammals have only black and white vision, quite likely because all the common ancestors the survived the K-T event (the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs) were nocturnal.

Some groups such as fructivore primates have since re-evolved color vision to recognize ripe fruit from unripe. Thus not only our ability to see "pretty" colors but our probable instinctive liking of them as "pretty".

Also, color is more complicated than simple wave length. Human perception and wavelength correspond fairly well most of the time. But we actually have three different cells for detecting color (rather than say two: one for high frequency one for low). The result is we can perceive a color like purple where in fact there is no one wavelength but a blending of two wavelengths. Pedantically by the way, red is a relatively low wave length.

Tiny fix: Red is high wavelength within the color spectrum. It has a low frequency, if that's what you mean.

That most mammals are color blind is nothing more than a myth. A few select are, like the marine mammals, but the vast majority are dichromats with red/blue color receptors.

The last common ancestor was in fact a trichromat, having one red and two different blue receptors. When mammals diverged further, monotremes lost one of the blue receptors while other mammals lost the other.

What did reevolve in groups such as marsupials and apes was the green color receptor, which was present in older ancestors, but had been lost in the first mammals.

source: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/364/15...

Maybe we perceive it as being boring because it is the average color of the universe?

After knowing the answer is beige, it's not actually surprising after looking at the spectrum. The spectrum they show is mostly flat so you don't expect one color to dominate much over another (maybe a bit more red than blue..).

edit: oops. My apologies, sodium is responsible for the dark band at ~5,890 I misread a graphic. Still looking into the spike...

If like me you just had to know what was responsible for the huge spike in the red (@ wavelength of about 6600 angstroms)....

Sodium.

Tangentially related (TIL) sodium also effects a star's end-of-life cycle: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-how-s...

In the spectrum graph (near the bottom) there are ¿two? light band at 4500-4600A but there is no spike in the graphic. All the other light bands have spikes and all the dark bands have valleys. Do you know what happened there?

Looks like the H-alpha emisison line at 656 nm. It's a pretty strong line in many astrophysical sources.

When we were doing the first major visual redesign of Google Search back in 2010, we made the top ads color this (IIRC it's called "Cosmic Latte" [1]) because Jon Wiley thought it'd be cool. It was changed soon after launch once the Ads folks started running A/B tests and making us more money, but for a while, everyone was looking at the average color of the universe every time they did a Google Search.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_latte

http://www.thecolorofpaloalto.com/

404

https://web.archive.org/web/20141218085910/http://thecolorof...

Worth having a play with colorpy, some nice examples here of how you go from a spectrum to a 'human' colour:

http://markkness.net/colorpy/ColorPy.html

Following your comment about 'ColorPy', I decided to write a quick IPython notebook using our API (Which is borrowing some plotting aspect ideas to Mark Kness package):

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/colour-science/colour-ram...

Ah that's nice, I was looking for a package that would do spectrum to colour in more or less a single line :)

Let us know if any issues!

I know that they were trying to find the average wavelengths of visible light, and I loathe pedantry, but shouldn't the answer be "black"?

In this context black is the absence of light, so it's disqualified right off the bat.

With a clear night and a good telescope there are a lot of stars out there. So I would say even the average color of the night sky looking out from earth wouldn't be black. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150101.html

I couldn't resist curiosity and had to analyze that apod image just to see...

  Average Color (rgb): 62, 45, 51
  Average Color (hex): #3E2D33 
  Average Color (visual): http://i.imgur.com/xDBeHqu.png

  Source: http://pastebin.com/vckL3AP6
  Credit: http://charlesmartinreid.com/wordpress/2012/08/python-image-averaging-and-color-averaging/ (with some cleanup)

I find it oddly appropriate that the average color of the universe is later described as the most boring color possible.

Priceonomics: We help companies crawl data from the web. Well, the article itself is indeed interesting, but I am just curious why they post these kind of content on their blog, is it related?

They want to position themselves as data 'freaks'. They have an interesting post when they released a book.

http://priceonomics.com/everything-is-bullshit-a-book-by-pri...

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