They’re just regular (prescription) glasses. The sky looks normal through them. What’s the deal?

  • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
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    8 days ago

    I mean, can you really say that something doesn’t have a colour if you see it as that colour? Does it really matter that the colour is coming from different refractive indexes rather than that wavelength not being absorbed by the material? If it consistently happens in that set of circumstances, isn’t it fair to say that is its colour? I.e. the coating, oil slicks

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Here’s the thing: if you change the thickness of the layer then the colour will change along with it, but the material is otherwise the same. This occurs because the layers produce a phenomenon known as thin film interference. So it’s not the material of the coating layer that produces the colour, it’s the interaction between two layers.

      Anyway, you can see all of the colours of a light’s spectrum through a prism but you wouldn’t say the prism itself is any of those colours. It’s transparent and refractive. That’s all we have here with the glasses: refraction and reflection, with interference of certain wavelengths due to the exact thickness of the layers.