so say you have a red ball (well a ball that appears to be the color red) and you put in in a room that is totally dark. not a single bit of light.

is it still red?

Try it as an experiment and post the results

luv4u said:

yeah... maybe if i get lucky i will get another sabbatical and have time to do just that! (speaking of which why did you close my 'sabbatical' topic?)

I know the answer to this...though I may not be 100% on this...this is the concept. It is still red, but you don't perceive it that way. Objects reflect light waves so that we see their color. However in absense of light there are no light wavs to "bounce" off anything. This is why things in very little light are gray and muted with very little color. Notice they have shape, but details and color are harder to make out.

Funny, I once had an argument regarding color and black and white. Humans dream in both. My friend argued that humans could not dream in B&W prior to TV because they didn't know what B&W looked like until Movies and TV were made. He didn't realize that the brain did not work that way and how it processed color in dreams had nothing to do with what we know or don't. It just switches the color off.

superspaceboy said:

the pigments on the ball are still the same in total darkness, but the colour totally depends on the light to bounce off it. But colour also is wholly dependent on our perception also, so if we were not there to perceive it and give it a name like red, would it still be red?

ZombieKitten said:

It depends on what exactly it means to say "the ball is red"... it's just a matter of definition.

ZombieKitten said:

that idea occurred to me as well. that color is ultimately a physical reaction between a light wave and some object. so as the physical properties have not changed so it would sill be red.

but it is weird to think about.. well i am weird (go figure) so i think it is interesting. this is not the same as being color blind... but i would think that there would be some way to tell what color an object would be in white light (by color i just mean the color it appears to be.)

Good question. I'd argue no.

Though the pigment on the ball would still be the same, color is not something implicit to the nature of the pigment, but rather a subjective sensory construct dependent on light. With no light, there can be no color -- hence blackness.

Moreover, the same ball, even in full light, could appear to be different shades and saturations to different persons based on their eye's capacity to process luminescence. Consider a colorblind person, to whom reds and greens or blues and yellows can be altogether nondiscernable. Here, again, the pigment isn't the control; the processing of light is.
[Edited 1/11/07 21:08pm]