Inside a room lit only by sodium lights, the yellow kind used in traffic tunnels, everything and everyone looked like they were part of a moving sepia photo. Instructor Chris Mathieson asked everyone to point to which of four newspapers was the only black and white one. Answers varied throughout the class and few were right - later most who were correct admitted that they had only guessed.
In the Figments, Pigments and Waves class on Monday, the students learned about color and light, this being the focus of the day. Talking much about the color spectrum, Chris even went so far as to send 15,000 volts of electricity through glass tubes full of pure gas, causing the gas to get excited and glow. He then pulled out prism slides and had all the students look at the gases through them, showing which parts of the spectrum were included in the light.

The most recognizable light that he showed was neon, it glowed bright red just like the motel and restaurant signs that are part of almost every town. Looking at the neon through a prism showed that neon is not a pure red; it also contains bits of orange and green. The class of 17 was captivated by the information provided by these experiments.

“Every year I try to change my class,” said Mathieson. When he thought up this year’s class he was studying the section of the brain dealing with color. “My [bachelor’s degree] is in philosophy and I’d always been interested in how the brain works ... It should be fun.”

After he finished discussing the spectrum in colored lights, he took out a white light to shine through a prism and spoke of Isaac Newton’s first experiment that discovered sunlight was made of a spectrum of colors, and his second that showed it wasn’t the prism that caused the colors, it actually was the light. Next, Chris pulled out a laser pointer, shining it through a prism, the laser made three reflections, like any other light, but none of these three had any gradation, showing that lasers are red and only red.

The next experiment Chris performed was one that answered the question “Why is the sky blue?” He took a bit of milk and added it to a beaker of water, making it slightly opaque. He then shone a white light, like the sun, through the beaker. The water looked blue except for where there was direct light, where it looked like the colors of a sunset. This action of color is called scattering, when light hits the atmosphere it shatters in all direction making the color spread throughout to make a blue sky and let the red, yellows and oranges through only when they are direct beams.