(Green 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 are going to be a lot of "Purple" there."

"I didn't "Teal" you about this earlier?"

"Well, 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 million different colors? But, what color

is a mirror?

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 iluminum. But, a mirror is, in reality,

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."

An object is whatever color it doesn't absorb. These sticky notes are orange because when

hit with typical white light, they absorb every other wavelength of visible light, except

for orange, which they diffuse into your eye balls.

But a perfect mirror reflects all colors equally. So, in a way, you could say that a mirror

is white, except a mirror doesn't reflect colors in the same way that pigment does.

A mirror reflects incoming light in a single outgoing direction: Specular Reflection, not

Diffuse. This kind of reflection creates an image of the very thing infront of the mirror.

So, as Bad Astronomy jokes, a mirror is more of a "smart white."

But, wait a second, that is a "perfect" mirror, and we live in the real world where there

are no perfect mirrors. Every mirror absorbs a little bit of light- not enough that it

matters, I mean, it looks pretty clear to me- but, when you take a look at the spectrum

of light reflected by a typical mirror, you will find that it best reflects light within

the 510 nanometer range, which we perceive as green light. So, technically, a mirror

is a tiny, tiny, tiny bit green.

You may have noticed this yourself when investigating a "Mirror Tunnel."

This happens when two mirrors face each other, reflecting the same scene back and forth,

and back and forth, and back and forth. With each new reflection, a little bit more visual

light is lost, but green least of all. That's why the reflection way down the tunnel is

dimmer, and greener.

So maybe real world mirrors aren't "smart white," they're actually kind of green, but

we should talk about white.

"En español, "white" es "blanco."

"En français, "white" est dit "blanc."

And in English, we have a word that comes from the same route: Black, which is the opposite

of white...how did that happen?

Well, it turns out that all of those words come from the same ancient Proto-Indo-European

root word "Bhleg," which meant "shine," "burn," "flash." Some languages took it to mean the

brightness of the flash: "white." While others took it to mean what's left behind: the burned,

"black," darkness.

If you have blue eyes, your eyes aren't actually blue, in the sense that the molecules inside

them are absorbing all other wavelengths of visible light and diffusing the blue. No,

no, no, instead, your eyes are blue for the same reason that the sky is blue: interference.

In our sky, light from the sun encounters molecules of air, and because of the size

of those molecules, light of longer wavelengths can slip on by, but shorter wavelengths crash

into the particles like blue light and scatter, which is why we see blue when we look at the

sky away from the sun.

Without the air molecules, that space would just be black. And when direct sunlight has

to travel through a lot of air, almost all of the colors get scattered out except for

the longest wavelengths, the red, which is what gives a sunrise and a sunset their color.

The iris of your eyeball contains a hazy layer where light can be scattered just like the

sky. Through a similar but slightly different process, shorter wavelengths are scattered

more, making your eyes look blue, unless, of course, you have some melonen in that iris,

in which case your eye is going to be green, hazel, or brown.

Enjoy those colors, and, as always, thanks for watching.