Why ROYGBIV is Wrong 🌈

Another YouTube #shorts from your favorite science dad, Dr. Joe!

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[zedmelon]

My name is Indigo Montoya.
You killed my color.
Prepare to dye.

[mrewan]

Newton's "blue" is current "cyan". Newton's "indigo" is current default "blue".

In a spectrum we can see cyan, blue, violet. Newton called them blue, indigo, violet.

Artists are sometimes tripped up by this. Yellow plus cyan (formerly blue) make a nice green. Yellow plus blue (formerly indigo) make a muddy, dull, dark green.

Modern letters for the spectrum should be ROYGCBV.

[AelwynMr]

I think the mistake is ours, not Newton's. Indigo is precisely the pigment that gives colour to blue jeans (still, even if it is now produced synthetically), so it's just plain old blue. When he said "blue", Newton meant the colour of the sky, the prototypical blue thing for a XVII century English gentleman. So in modern English we would say something like red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, violet, which makes 100% sense and is what was meant from the beginning.

PS: Meanwhile, I searched for the original! At page 34 of Opticks, published in 1704, Newton gives the colours as "Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blew, Indigo, deep Violet". Throughout the book, he often calls indigo and violet "dark" or "faint and dark" and so often difficult to distinguish, which goes to show that he indeed considered "blew" to be a light colour, like the blue of the sky or of blue eyes (cyan, if you wish), and indigo a darker blue.

[BigGringus]

As Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “The guy invented calculous, he can have his seven colors.” 😂

[JoaoP.]

In Portuguese, it's VAAVAAV. Pretty easy to remember, and it's even a palyndrome. (It stands for

[Kaori_Miyou.]

Yall learned ROYGBIV while I learned VIBGYOR 😭

[badunius_code]

"Where's indigo?!"
Me, pointing at the screen: here it is, don't you see it?

[_Egg_]

I have beef with Indigo, and this just made my day

[JoggingMyMind]

i have tetrachromacy (4 color receptor cells, instead of the average 3), so the difference between indigo and violet it very apparent.

Edit: i would also like to add that i was formally tested through a genetic test, and something like a color match test where you have to rank how closely one color relates to another.

i cannot see UV light, it just means i can see the visible color spectrum more in depth, especially yellows and greens.

[fios]

I'd change indigo to blue and blue to cyan. Cyan and blue are very distinct

[saumitrachakravarty]

I learnt it as VIBGYOR. Waaay pronounceable.

[ffiordhn]

I can see indigo perfectly, in fact it's my favorite color of the entire rainbow! It's a very, very deep blue that isn't like, navy blue (which IMO carries some green), it's something different. Also, true violet (rather than 'fake violet', go read Line of Purples for more info) looks genuinely mystical. No wonder why people in the past thought of it as a highly noble color!

[cottoncandyswirl]

I learned Red Orange Yellow Green Blue and Purple, I don't know where the heck Indigo and Violet came from

[therongjr]

How cultures name colors influences how they perceive them. There also seems to be a natural progression in the colors recognized as specificity increases. First black/white, then red, then yellow or green, followed by yellow or green, etc. Anyways, many cultures make a distinction between light blue and dark blue. I think the "indigo" in ROYGBIV maps to dark/royal blue while the "blue" in ROYGBIV maps to light blue/cyan.

[OpenTanyao]

I love how his split light from the prism is clearly split into 3 distinguishable bands of blue, while he's saying we only really see 2

[MGSLurmey]

I disagree. If indigo is just dark blue to us today then it very much is there. If anything its VIOLET that doesn't exist in a rainbow. Violet used to mean what we now refer to as indigo or dark/navy blue, but it now refers to a more purple colour that doesn't exist in a rainbow!

So I propose the colours be ROYGCB for Red Orange Yellow Green Cyan Blue!

[dxlaser]

In Portugal we learn it as VAAVAAV. It's way easier to memorize

[HavengulRunebinder]

Bro said hopefully he could convince us and then failed to make any argument whatsoever outside of "newton was probably superstitious"

[Radioactive_Skittles]

I have been saying this for years, Indigo is just a shade of blue.
“bUt iTs A mIx oF pUrpLe aNd bL-“
If we’re counting every single combination of colors, we’d have to count teal since it’s both a bit of blue and green.

[zerrebel]

Ill always remember it as "Richard of York gave battle in vain"