Abstract
Light and sound are the two most important wave phenomena people experience in daily life. We start this chapter by defining various concepts and units used for characterizing light and light sources, both in a purely physical setting and as judged by human vision. We then give important characteristics of the wavelength ranges of the various receptors in the human eye and how our colour vision makes the foundation of additive colour mixing in modern colour picture technology. We also point out how dispersion leads to colour spectra and boundary colours for specific boundary conditions. A few curious phenomena found in human colour vision are also mentioned.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Jan Henrik Wold (at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Drammen), and Knut Kvaal (at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ã…s for useful comments on this chapter. Any errors and omissions in this part of the chapter are entirely my responsibility (AIV) and not theirs.
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Vistnes, A.I. (2018). Measurements of Light, Dispersion, Colours. In: Physics of Oscillations and Waves. Undergraduate Texts in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72314-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72314-3_11
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