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Hey, Vsauce – Michael, here and today we are going to talk about color. (Green, Green Green) GOLD on, let me just PINK this up. YELLOW? Michael ORANGE you going to come to the concert this evening? I RED about that. There gonna be a lot of PURPLE there. I didn’t TEAL you about the this earlier. Look I have to go BROWN town first, but I’ll be WHITE BLACK. Colors.

Did you know that the human eye can differentiate 10,000,000 million different colors.

[Vsauce – Michael Stevens]
But what color is a mirror?

[Vsauce – Michael Stevens]
You might say Silver because mirrors are often illustrated that way and to be sure they are made out of Silver or silvery things like aluminum. But a mirror in reality is whatever color you point it at.

In this green room the mirror is green.

And if you look inside a mirror it becomes “You-Colored”. And object is whatever color it doesn’t absorb. These sticky notes are Orange because when hit with typical white light, they absorb every other wave length of visible light except for Orange. Which they defuse into your eyeballs. But a perfect mirror reflects all (Specular and Diffuse Reflection) colors equally, so in a way, you can say that a mirror is White. Except a mirror doesn’t reflect colors in the same way a pigment does. A mirror reflects incoming light in a single out going direction – specular reflection. Not diffuse. This kind of reflection creates an image of the very thing in front of the mirror. So as bad astronomy jokes: “a mirror is more or a smart kind of white.”

[Message:
What color is a mirror?

Now that is a question I never would have thought of!
First lets define what color is. What we call white light is actually made up of lots of different colors of light, literally all the colors of the rainbow. It has been known for hundreds of years that light can behave like a wave. You can think of it like a series of ripples, with a height to each ripple and a distance between the incoming ripples (called the wavelength). The color of light is determined by the wavelength: the long wavelengths make red light, somewhat shorter makes yellow, shorter even than that makes blue.

Suppose you are wearing a red shirt. That means that of all the colors of light hitting the shirt, they all get absorbed by the shirt except for red. The red light gets reflected by the shirt and into your eye. So the color of an object depends on what wavelengths of light it reflects. If it reflects all wavelengths, we say it is white. If it reflects none it is black.

A perfect mirror does actually reflect all light hitting it. So why doesn’t it look white? It’s because a mirror reflects light in a coherent manner; that is, the light is reflected back from the mirror depending on how the light came in. A white shirt just reflects light back everywhere in all directions. Even if red and blue light hit the shirt coming from the same direction, they may get scattered in different directions. A mirror, on the other hand, reflects the blue and red light in the same direction, and so the mirror actually builds an image of the source of the light.

So you can think of a mirror as being white, since it reflects all colors, but a smart kind of white. I guess you could say that a mirror is simply the color of whatever light source it sees!

There are many places on the web that talk about rainbows, mirrors and light.

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Edited by CaptainClipy
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