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Moment Of Um

Why are the primary colors different from the colors of light?

Moment Of Um

Lemonada Media

Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.41.5K Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2023

⏱️ 5 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

You may have learned that the colors red, yellow, and blue are called primary colors. It’s sometimes said you can use those three to make all the other colors. But can red, yellow, and blue really mix to make any color, or is there more to the story?  We asked color scientist Stephen Westland to help us find the answer. Got a question that came up out of the blue? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll help find a CYAN-tific answer! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um.

0:04.9

Answering those questions that make you go, um, um, um, um, moment of um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna G.

0:29.4

Art was always one of my favorite subjects in school.

0:32.8

When I was in second grade, we had an art teacher, Mrs. Ames, that taught us about primary colors with a little

0:38.2

song that I still remember and went like this. Red yellow blue, red yellow blue, I see you,

0:47.0

red yellow blue, you are the primary colors, you make all the other colors, I wish I were a color just like red, yellow, blue. Yep,

0:57.6

that song is still bopping around my brain 30 years down the road. But looking back on the lyrics,

1:03.6

I have some questions. First of all, do I wish I were a color? Which one? Green, maybe. Yeah,

1:10.8

yeah, a nice mossy green. Okay, that answers that one.

1:14.7

But you know what else I learned in school? I learned that sunlight is made up of all the colors of

1:19.9

the rainbow. If you let sunlight shine through a special glass shape called a prism, it splits the

1:25.5

light into those different colors and you see a little rainbow.

1:28.7

So if sunlight is made of all the colors, who decided that red, yellow, and blue were the

1:34.7

primary ones? Do red, yellow, and blue actually make all the other colors? My friends Evelyn

1:41.7

and Luke might not have had art class with Mrs. Ames, but they've got questions too.

1:46.5

Hi, I'm Evelyn. Hi, I'm Luke and we're from Chicago, Illinois. And our question is, why are primary colors different from the colors of light?

2:00.5

If we want to get the largest range of colours by mixing three coloured lights,

2:05.9

the best we can do is use red, green and blue.

2:10.3

My name is Stephen Westland.

2:11.9

I'm a professor at the University of Leeds.

2:15.1

I literally study every aspect of colour. A set of primary colours is simply a set

2:21.3

of coloured lights or colourance, dyes or pigments. When we mix them together, we can make a wide range

...

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