What Color Is A Mirror?

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Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And today we are going to talk about color. (Green Green, Green Green). "Gold" on, let me just "Pink" this up. "Yellow?" "Michael, "Orange" you going to come to the concert this evening?" "I "Red" about that, there are going to be a lot of "Purple" there." "I didn't "Teal" you about this earlier?" "Well, look, I have to go "Brown" town first, but I'll be "White Black." Colors... Did you know that the human eye can differentiate 10 million different colors? But what color is a mirror? You might say "silver," because mirrors are often illustrated that way, and, to be sure, they are made out of silver or silvery things like aluminium. But a mirror, in reality, is whatever color you point it at. In this Green Room, the mirror is green. And if you look inside a mirror, it becomes "you-colored." An object is whatever color it doesn't absorb. These sticky notes are orange because when hit with typical white light, they absorb every other wavelength of visible light, except for orange, which they diffuse into your eye balls. But a perfect mirror reflects all colors equally. So, in a way, you could say that a mirror is white, except a mirror doesn't reflect colors in the same way that pigment does. A mirror reflects incoming light in a single outgoing direction - specular reflection, not diffuse. This kind of reflection creates an image of the very thing in front of the mirror. So, as Bad Astronomy jokes, a mirror is more of a "smart white." But wait a second, that is a "perfect" mirror and we live in the real world where there are no perfect mirrors. Every mirror absorbs a little bit of light, not enough that it matters, I mean, it looks pretty clear to me, but when you take a look at the spectrum of light reflected by a typical mirror, you will find that it best reflects light within the 510 nanometer range, which we perceive as green light. So, technically, a mirror is a tiny, tiny, tiny bit green. You may have noticed this yourself when investigating a "Mirror Tunnel." This happens when two mirrors face each other, reflecting the same scene back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth. With each new reflection, a little bit more visual light is lost, but green least of all. That's why the reflection way down the tunnel is dimmer and greener. So maybe real world mirrors aren't "smart white," they're actually kind of green, but we should talk about white. "En español, "white" es "blanco." "En français, "white" est dit "blanc." And in English we have a word that comes from the same route. Black, which is the opposite of white. How did that happen? Well, it turns out that all of those words come from the same ancient Proto-Indo-European root word "Bhleg," which meant "shine," "burn," "flash." Some languages took it to mean the brightness of the flash: "white." While others took it to mean what's left behind: the burned, "black," darkness. If you have blue eyes, your eyes aren't actually blue, in the sense that the molecules inside them are absorbing all other wavelengths of visible light and diffusing the blue. No, no, no, instead, your eyes are blue for the same reason that the sky is blue: interference. In our sky, light from the Sun encounters molecules of air and because of the size of those molecules, light of longer wavelengths can slip on by, but shorter wavelengths crash into the particles, like blue light, and scatter, which is why we see blue when we look at the sky away from the Sun. Without the air molecules, that space would just be black. And when direct sunlight has to travel through a lot of air, almost all of the colors get scattered out except for the longest wavelengths, the red, which is what gives a sunrise and a sunset their color. The iris of your eyeball contains a hazy layer where light can be scattered just like the sky. Through a similar, but slightly different process, shorter wavelengths are scattered more, making your eyes look blue, unless, of course, you have some melonen in that iris, in which case your eyes are going to be green, hazel or brown. Enjoy those colors. And as always, thanks for watching.
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Channel: Vsauce
Views: 15,566,967
Rating: 4.9161091 out of 5
Keywords: What Color Is A Mirror, what, color, is, mirror, optics, rainbow, light, reflection, specular, diffuse, colour, eye, eyes, iris, blue, sky, why is the sky blue, sunset, sunrise, white, etymology, color terms, colour terms, what is color, what is colour, sun
Id: -yrZpTHBEss
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 5min 1sec (301 seconds)
Published: Fri Aug 03 2012
Reddit Comments

I would like to point out that it is the glass that gives it the green tint. If we had perfectly clear glass, you would have a perfectly clear mirror.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 111 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/tllnbks πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Aug 04 2012 πŸ—«︎ replies

I Can't fucking believe it. I Can't fucking believe it. I Can't fucking believe it. I had only one horrible teacher in my childhood, she never accepted opinion.

We talked about this subject, the subject of the mirror colour. She said that it had no colour, I told her I saw it green. She told me that's impossible since it had no colour. I kept inquiring and she kept saying I was wrong.

I ended up asking her "is it impossible that I see it green, am I lying?" and she said (sort of shouted) yes. I was an impressionable child and I got impressed.

So I shut the fuck up and the class continues. To this fucking day 18 years later I still believed that mirrors couldn't be green until now. Of course I don't think about that so often, but it pops up every now and then.

Thank you for posting this. That bitch. I won.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 408 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/viralizate πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Aug 04 2012 πŸ—«︎ replies

The green comes from the glass. Most glass is soda-lime glass which has a green tint because of iron impurities. If you look at a piece of glass on edge, you can usually see the green color. Other types of glass don't have a green tint so mirrors made from them won't actually be green.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 19 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/uraniumballoon πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Aug 04 2012 πŸ—«︎ replies

"You-Colored" That was very politically correct of them.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 58 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/PropagandaMan πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Aug 04 2012 πŸ—«︎ replies

Fuck school. I've got Vsauce

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 35 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/Alexarrona πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Aug 04 2012 πŸ—«︎ replies

tldw: green

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 60 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/teachthecontroversy πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Aug 04 2012 πŸ—«︎ replies

I was accidentally educated ):

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 95 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/chyyeeah πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Aug 04 2012 πŸ—«︎ replies

"Black" stems from "Blanco" and "Blanc?" I've always assumed "Blank" shared origins with blanco and blanc, and 'blank' seems to imply white.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 18 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/nxlyd πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Aug 04 2012 πŸ—«︎ replies

The guy sounds like David Cross.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 11 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/pendejada πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Aug 04 2012 πŸ—«︎ replies
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