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I know that difference between different colors of light is difference between their wave length but I don't know what gives beautiful colors (like rainbow colors) to different wave length of observable light?

What makes our eyes to see different wavelengths of light as different colors?

Remark: I've meet someone which he was color blind, he was not able to see rainbow colors. So the process that gives color to light must be in our eyes and brain.

WYSIWYG
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  • This is not a physics question, but a biology question. Please ask on biology.se instead. – Kenshin Apr 18 '13 at 00:47
  • Basically cone-cells in the eye detect colours and consequently send an impulse to the brain. – Kenshin Apr 18 '13 at 00:58
  • Our eyes detect light waves of different wavelengths, which we then perceive using our brain as colour. – Kenshin Apr 18 '13 at 01:10
  • @Chris: This really falls in the gap between physics and biology; I don't see it as belonging clearly to either. Is there a bio-physics.se yet? –  Apr 18 '13 at 01:30
  • Related to http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/48224/11062 and its answers there. –  Apr 18 '13 at 01:33
  • i think the clearest understanding you could have here is that we see these colors as an evolutionary adaptation (for example, we see a wider range of green vs other colors). the reason we see within this particular spectrum is because it's the spectrum of light which survives Earth's atmosphere on its way to our eyes, so it is evolutionarily favored (in the sense that we get more information from our environment by being able to detect light in this range) – amr Apr 18 '13 at 01:36
  • Achmet, I've linked one duplicate of your question, but if you search this site for "eye color cones" or something similar you'll find many related question. – John Rennie Apr 18 '13 at 06:23
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    @Anixx: You have been told before: Philosophy-like tags like 'metaphysics' tag are not allowed, cf. e.g. this and this meta Phys.SE post. –  Apr 18 '13 at 09:15
  • This is a philosophical question rather than physical. I believe it is off-topic here. I suggest you to look up for for qualia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/ – Anixx Apr 18 '13 at 07:23

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Three different types of cones in the eye are sensitive to three different, contiguous and slightly overlapping, sections of the visible spectrum. The nerve signals from these three different types of cones are interpreted by different sections of the brain as cyan, magenta, and yellow, from which all the discernible colours are composed. This forms the familiar Colour Triangle.

The sides of the Colour Triangle bulge slightly (I believe) because of the slight overlap in the sensitivity ranges of the three cone types.

Colour blindness occurs when someone is born with only two (or rarely one or none) different types of cones, instead of the usual three. This causes an inability to detect one of the thee sub-spectra.

Pieter Geerkens
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    you should add a sentence that addresses the double value :both the frequency spectrum is seen correctly and the mixture of three frequencies can give the same color response even though the "clean" frequency is missing. –  Apr 18 '13 at 04:11