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by staplung 56 days ago
What if I like magenta? Or brown?
2 comments

Pedantry for pedantry, you're in luck as the title says they created 'any wavelength lasers' not 'any wavelength laser' so you can make any such combos you like rather than the fixed set now (if true) :p.
Can I interest you in indigo or violet? Or a nice orange?
Genuine q: how close can you get to magenta with the rainbow?
What we call "magenta" is the sensation of both red and blue color-sensitive cells in the eye being excited at the same time. There's no single wavelength that produces this effect (unlike e.g. yellow). The closes you can get is violet, which looks faint to the eye.

A rainbow gives you both red and blue; mute everything else, and you'll get magenta. That's what magenta pigments do when illuminated by white light (which is a rainbow scrambled).

It never clicked before that yellow and magenta are snowflakes to each other in this regard. I thought they were equals, but magenta is more majestic!
Saying a wavelength doesn’t do it doesn’t make any sense. If you can perceive it visually, a wavelength is doing it.
Two wavelengths do it; one does not suffice. It's like a perfect fifth can not one note.
The interference is a wavelength too. Maybe not pure but it is one. Afaik they cannot be interpreted as two separate wavelengths and then “brain combined” when the aperture (the retina) is so small.
Not very! This is on the "line of purples".

Here's a nice visualization of color perception (there are more modern ones, but we used the 1931 color space when I was working in the field). The horseshoe shape on the outside is the single wavelength colors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space