THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF

SCIENCE, NATURE, HISTORY, CULTURE, BEAUTY OF RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE & VIOLET JOANN ECKSTUT AND ARIELLE ECKSTUT

DESIGNED BY EIGHT AND A HALF BROOKLYN, NY

ienne stwood

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7/3/13 1:46 PM

DO YOU COME HERE OFTEN?

Not all pollinators are attracted to the same me color owers. Instead particular colors ors attract particular members of the he animal kingdom. Smell also comes es into the picture, especially for or ies, which are attracted to owers that smell like rotting esh. h.

137

A RAINBOW OF FUNGI

Unknown Ascomycete

Hygrocybe psittacina

Podostroma cornu-damae

Leotia viscosa

Mycena interrupla

Cookeina tricholoma

Cortinarius iodes

Unknown Lepista sp.

Mucronella sp.

140

141

15213_COLOR_120-143_Flora.indd 140

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15213_COLOR_120-143_Flora.indd 141

7/3/13 12:53 PM

the cause of visible lightin other words, the cause of color. He identied other groups of electromagnetic waves, too, groups we

To get a handle on exactly what length and frequency are all about, imagine you are holding one end of a jump rope. Another

ON THE SAME WAVELENGTH

All electromagnetic radiation (just another word for the movement of a wave through an electromagnetic eld) travels through a vacuum at the stupendous speed of 186,282 miles per second, also known as the speed of light. As you can see, the visible spectrum is just a tiny band of the elecromagnetic spectrum.

SHORTER WAVELENGTH
(MORE ENERGY)

LO ONGER WAVELENGTH
(LESS ENERGY)

VISIBLE LIGHT

TELEVISION WAVES GAMMA RAYS X-RAYS ULTRAVIOLET RAYS INFRARED RAYS MICROWAVES RADAR RAYS RADIO WAVES

ELF WAVES

FREQUENCY
v (IN HERTZ)

17

ist, Robert Shapely and psychologist, James Gordon.

T squa hold

27

language of color is uid, morphing over time and across geographies in response to cultural forces that are sometimes too complex to pin down. For example, the color Newton called indigo is the one most people would identify as plain old blue or a true blue that falls midway between green and violet. Newtons blue is what we now call cyan, a more turquoise blue that falls between blue and green.

e unre his Taken scale, sthetewton gin of specviolet.

NEWTON INDIGO

NEWTON BLUE

13

More than any other color of the spectrum, yellow stands out. This is because the sensitivity of our eyes is at its peak when it

fruits were too big for birds and needed pollinators. We just happened (or did we?) to develop our increased sensitivity to