A Rational Cosmology: Color as a Property Intrinsic to Entities

Essay LIII

This is Essay LIII of Mr. Stolyarov's series, "A Rational Cosmology," which seeks to present objective, absolute, rationally grounded views of terms such as universe, matter, volume, space, time, motion, sound, light, forces, fields, and even the higher-order concepts of life, consciousness, and volition. See the index of all the essays in "A Rational Cosmology" here.

Now that the cosmological underpinnings of the phenomenon of light have been explained, it is possible to rationally analyze the type of existent that the concept of "color" denotes.

It is ubiquitously known that not all entities react to light in the same way. Aside from an entity's spatial contours and motion, the entities that light illuminates exhibit another property that allows some of them (or parts of them) to appear differently than do others to the observer.

This is a property intrinsic to the entities, even though light is needed to make it accessible to the eye, as demonstrated by the manner in which this property will be exhibited given various types of illumination.

A ball called "red" will appear red under white light, black under blue light or green light, and red under red light. Physics has explained this to mean that the ball absorbs blue and green light (and any combination thereof) and reflects red light into the eye of the observer. Whenever red light is present, it will reflect only red light, and only of a certain specific "wavelength" (a misnamed unit, as previously explained) that denotes the "shade" of red the ball possesses.

The ability to reflect only red light is a property possessed by the ball, independent of what sort of illumination it is presently subjected to. Other balls might be blue or green, and thus have entirely different abilities to reflect only blue or green light, and not red light, as the former ball. Other balls still might have the ability to reflect two fundamental types of light and therefore be colored violet, or yellow, or orange, or to reflect all light and therefore be colored white.