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Overheard a physicist say "the sun is actually green" and my brain short-circuited
I was waiting for coffee this morning and two people next to me were talking about how the sun peaks in the green spectrum but our eyes see it as white because of how our brains process light. I had to google it later and apparently it's true - the sun emits most of its energy in green wavelengths. So why don't we see a green ball in the sky? Something about how our eyes balance color or whatever. Has anyone else heard this and can explain it without making my head hurt more?
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nancyj111mo ago
Wait, the sun peaks in green? That one actually made me stop and scroll back up. I always figured it was yellow like we see in drawings.
I guess it makes sense since our eyes adjust to stuff like white balance on a camera, but still feels weird knowing the most intense part of sunlight is green.
Makes you wonder what other everyday things we're getting completely wrong just because of how our brains filter them.
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tarabell1mo ago
I read somewhere that if you actually looked at the sun through a prism, the green part is where all the energy is concentrated. Our eyes just kind of squash the whole thing down into what we call "white light" so we don't go blind trying to process it. Kind of like how that dress thing broke the internet a few years back with the whole blue vs gold thing. Our brains are just doing their best to make sense of the world, not necessarily showing us the truth.
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