Why Is It A Colour Wheel And Not A Line?
The Rest Is Science
Aug 5, 2026 23:05
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Colour wheel or colour line? Light itself runs in a straight line from red to violet, yet every colour theory chart bends that spectrum into a circle and the reason has nothing to do with physics.
Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (VSauce) dig into why human vision refuses to see colour the way light actually behaves, tracing the visible light spectrum from one end to the other and asking where all the "missing" colours, like magenta and purple, actually come from if they don't exist on that spectrum at all.
It turns out the colour wheel is less a description of light and more a diagram of a workaround your brain performs constantly.
Send questions of your own to [email protected] or find us at r/TheRestIsScience.
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