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Light is perceived by the human visual system as white when the incoming light to the eye stimulates all three types of color sensitive cone cells in the eye in roughly equal amounts. [27] Materials that do not emit light themselves appear white if their surfaces reflect back most of the light that strikes them in a diffuse way .
The spectrum does not contain all the colors that the human visual system can distinguish. Unsaturated colors such as pink, or purple variations like magenta, for example, are absent because they can only be made from a mix of multiple wavelengths. Colors containing only one wavelength are also called pure colors or spectral colors. [8] [9]
A dispersive prism can be used to break white light up into its constituent spectral colors (the colors of the rainbow) to form a spectrum as described in the following section. Other types of prisms noted below can be used to reflect light, or to split light into components with different polarizations.
Most objects do not reflect or transmit light specularly and to some degree scatters the incoming light, which is called glossiness. Surface scatterance is caused by the surface roughness of the reflecting surfaces, and internal scatterance is caused by the difference of refractive index between the particles and medium inside the object.
When a pigment or ink is added, wavelengths are absorbed or "subtracted" from white light, so light of another color reaches the eye. If the light is not a pure white source (the case of nearly all forms of artificial lighting), the resulting spectrum will appear a slightly different color. Red paint, viewed under blue light, may appear black ...
René Descartes had seen light separated into the colors of the rainbow by glass or water, [5] though the source of the color was unknown. Isaac Newton 's 1666 experiment of bending white light through a prism demonstrated that all the colors already existed in the light, with different color " corpuscles " fanning out and traveling with ...
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And, when a colored object has both diffuse and specular reflection, usually only the diffuse component is colored. A cherry reflects diffusely red light, absorbs all other colors and has a specular reflection which is essentially white (if the incident light is white light).