Color and Sound Perception Explained by Theoretical Physicist and Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek

Color and Sound Perception Explained by Theoretical Physicist and Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek

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"In the nineteenth century, with Maxwell’s Synthesis of the Laws of Electricity and Magnetism, physicists started to realize that what we perceive as light is deeply understood as a kind of disturbance of electric and magnetic fields." Frank Wilczek says. "That gave us a new concept of the possibilities of perception of light, that show us we’re missing a lot."

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FRANK WILCZEK:

Frank Wilczek is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and a Nobel laureate. He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Wilczek, along with David Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Future of Life Institute. His new book is titled A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Frank Wilczek:  In the nineteenth century with Maxwell’s synthesis of the laws of electricity and magnetism physicists started to realize that what we perceive as light is deeply understood as a kind of disturbance, electric and magnetic fields. That gave us a new concept of the possibilities of perception of light that show us that we’re missing a lot. The electromagnetic equations permit radiation of any wave length and of any frequency – what we perceive as color – what we perceive as light is corresponds to a very narrow band of frequencies out of an infinite continuum. Not only that but even within that band we take three averages. We don’t sample all the different frequencies but just three averages. That’s called trichromatic vision. So for instance in computer displays there are three different kinds of lighting elements used. When you see on your menu the choice of millions of different colors that doesn’t mean different lighting arrangements, lighting possibilities. It means different combinations, different relative intensities of just three. Any perceived color can be synthesized from three basic colors.

Other creatures see less. Dogs, for instance, see only two kinds of colors like color blind people see basically only two kinds of colors. Other creatures see more. Other creatures – many insects and birds see four or five colors. They also sample kinds of light, kinds of electromagnetic radiation that humans don’t see. There’s infrared radiation. There’s ultraviolet radiation. Maxwell’s equations which describe light also describe radio waves and microwaves and x-rays and gamma rays. So all those things are possible forms of vision that human’s natural endowment doesn’t tap into. But it’s out there. On the one hand it’s very important to make concepts visual because it taps into very powerful methods of processing that we have. And on the other hand scientific knowledge of what light is shows us that our natural perception leaves a lot on the table and so it leaves us with the program of doing better with telescopes, microscopes, spectrometers and other kinds of gadgets that I’m developing for everyday life that will allow us to see more colors.

The human perception of color is limited really by the principles of quantum mechanics. It’s interesting to compare the human perception of color to the perception of sound. Our perception of sound in one way is much richer. When you have two pure tones together like a C and a G, a simple chord that’s a fifth. If you hear that you can hear the separate tones even though they’re played together and you hear a chord. You can also sense the separate tones and if one is louder than the other you can continuously judge how their relative intensity. Whereas with colors if you mix two different – if you have two different colors say spectral green and spectral red and mix them what you see is not a chord where you can see the distinct identities preserved but rather an intermediate color. In fact you’ll see something that looks like yellow. The perception of color sort of throws away the detailed resolution, detailed accounting of the different kinds of underlying tones, different kinds of pure frequencies or pure colors that are underlying the perception. Our perception of that kind of mixture is indistinguishable from our perception of a pure spectral yellow such as you’d see in a rainbow.

It’s as if in music when you played a C and a G together instead of hearing ...

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