This book aims to popularize physics by emphasizing conceptual ideas of physics and their interconnections, while avoiding mathematics entirely. The approach is to explore intriguing topics by asking and discussing questions, thereby the reader can participate in developing answers, which enables a deeper understanding than is achievable with memorization. The topic of this volume, "Colors, light and Optical Illusions", is chosen because we face colors and light every waking minute of our lives, and we experience optical illusions much more often than we realize. This book will attract all those with a curious mind about nature and with a desire to understand how nature works, especially the younger generation of secondary-school children and their teachers.
Author(s): Michel A Van Hove
Edition: 1
Publisher: WSPC
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 294
Tags: Physics; Colors; Light
Contents
Preface
List of Concepts, Connections and Terminology
1 Our Goals
2 What is Light and What Colors Exist?
2.1 How many colors can you distinguish and name?
2.2 Can colors be mixed to produce new colors?
2.3 The color triangle
2.4 Color: Hue versus intensity
2.5 Black, white and gray; the solar spectrum
2.6 What is the color of a surface that reflects light?
2.7 Complementary colors
2.8 Sun and sky colors
2.9 What have we learned in this Chapter?
3 The Full Cycle of Imaging with Colors
4 Describing and Working with Colors
4.1 The RGB, CMY and HSL systems of colors
4.2 Reflected colors
4.3 How many colors do we need?
4.4 Conversion from color to gray, and conversion from gray to color
4.5 What have we learned in this Chapter?
5 Recording Images
5.1 Human vision
5.1.1 About cones and rods
5.1.2 Sharpness of view: Visual acuity
5.1.3 Focusing in the eye
5.1.4 Animal vision
5.1.5 Facial recognition, neurons and neural networks
5.2 Film photography
5.3 Digital photography
5.4 What have we learned in this Chapter?
6 Creating Color and Displaying Color
6.1 Creating and displaying ink and paint color
6.2 Creating and displaying digital color
6.2.1 Emitter pixels
6.2.2 Creating nearly 17 million colors
6.2.3 How can we actually create the 16,777,216 different RGB colors?
6.3 Sources of light
6.4 What have we learned in this Chapter?
7 Seeing Invisible Colors
7.1 The electromagnetic spectrum
7.2 Shifting invisible colors to visible colors: Thermal imaging
7.3 Shifting invisible colors to visible gray: X-rays
7.4 Shifting invisible colors to visible RGB: Multispectral imaging
7.5 Making invisible colors visible by fluorescence or phosphorescence
7.6 What do we gain by using invisible light?
7.7 What have we learned in this Chapter?
8 Color Blindness, Color Vision Deficiency and Normal Vision
8.1 Surprises of color blindness and color vision deficiency
8.2 Surprising lessons for normal color vision
8.3 Variations in normal color vision
8.4 What have we learned in this Chapter?
9 Wavy Artifacts: Moiré Patterns
9.1 Examples of artificial wavy patterns
9.2 One-dimensional moiré patterns
9.3 Two-dimensional moiré patterns
9.4 What have we learned in this Chapter?
10 Optical Illusions
10.1 Now you see it, now you don’t: Time and color
10.1.1 Color changes: Afterimages
10.1.2 Pattern recognition: In time and space
10.1.3 Contrasting shades
10.2 Optical illusions in two dimensions
10.2.1 Two-dimensional directional illusions
10.2.2 Two-dimensional size illusions
10.3 Optical illusions in three dimensions
10.3.1 From 3D real scene to 2D physical image to 3D mental model
10.3.2 Weaving
10.3.3 Concave-convex
10.3.4 Penrose triangle: Impossible tri-bar
10.3.5 Penrose stairs: Impossible staircase
10.4 What have we learned in this Chapter?
11 Afterthoughts
11.1 From colors to “controlled hallucinations”?
11.2 From colors to the laws of physics
Supplementary Material
References and Resources
Index
About the Author
