One of these days…
8th January 2007
… i’m going to have the right answer when one of my children asks me if white is a colour and what it is if it isn’t? WHY WHY WHY do they all hit on this?
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15 Responses to “One of these days…”
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ahem .. it’s a tone
*fake snooty sniff*
Don’t take that tone with me
I was asked if everything has a point today,lol.
My eldest has noticed the adverts for teaching on the TV and noted the questions such as ‘Can you cry under water?’ and ‘Is there a difference between fluff and dust?’
I just send them online to see if they can find out…keeps them quiet for ages
Obviously you should start lecturing them about colour being light of different wavelengths and how white light is formed when all the wavelengths are present (and I’m explaining this very badly because I am in the middle of cooking dinner, and Chris F or Google could do it much better) and how colours of objects depend on which wavelengths of light are absorbed, and – and – and – anyway, if you carry on in this vein for long enough (preferably without breathing), they’ll back away and eventually leave, and never ask you such a question again.
And that got moderated! Are you screening for style now? Do long run-on sentences get edited?
Giggle.. one of my favourite Alison quotes is you saying “my style of home education is to answer every question and just keep talking till they give up and walk away…!”
Dunno; Jax did something to Spam Karma today and suddenly i have to release things again!
No she can’t be, I’d never get published!
And you didn’t
Damn, my secret is out.
that made me laugh a lot – my brief comment didn’t get through but one for glass cabinet doors did
I’m not even sure ‘white’ as a single defined ‘thing’ exists – . Unlike black, which is a total absence of colour. Yes, the essence of white is that it an ‘equal’ – in whatever terms equal is measured – mixture of all the wavelengths of visible light. But what what we see as white is very much bound up with visual perception – hence the whole issue of white balance with photos. Get ten white objects – put them together, they will likley all look a different colour together – and of course a ‘white’ object will only look ‘white’ in ‘white ‘ light.
So maybe the answer is that white doesn’t exist any way?
Hope that helped
Yeah, tell them it’s a Platonic ideal. And then tell them to %^&* off
Doesn’t matter what anyone says; you can get white and black poster paint and therefore they are and my normally malleable children won’t budge from that point!
White is a colour; it’s the only colour with none of the bits (wavelengths) missing. Red is a colour too, with all the non-red wavelengths missing and so on.
Of course there being 3 primary colours of light and a different 3 primary colours of pigment doesn’t help. (If you mix red, yellow and blue paints you don’t get white
.)
I think I prefer Alison’s response in number 11 – philosophy and rudeness.
At art school we were taught that white paint is when all the colour is taken out, and that black paint is when all the colours are added together. They even had us all try to make black (which isn’t very successful btw).
I think for most children this is an answer they can relate to.
When they are a bit older, you can try giving them some watercolours where there isn’t any white or black. (The artist sets come like this but you can get a cheaper set and take them out). White is the paper, lighter colours are made by letting the paper show through, and the darker colours have to be mixed in other ways than by just adding black. Then paint something they can see, like a simple still life of natural objects.
The scientific answer goes something lie this… for white paint to work it has to contain no colour – so that it reflects all the colours of the spectrum back at our eyes – and we see “white”. Black paint has to have all the colours included so that all the colours in light are absorbed, none are reflected back – and we see black.
Give that girl a gold star!