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Colors We Never Dreamed

This is old news by now, but it still makes me smile when I imagine...

The spectrum we learned in high school is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

This covers all the wavelengths of visible light. The wavelengths longer than red light and shorter than violet light are infrared and ultraviolet, invisible without special equipment.

So where's magenta, which should be halfway between red and violet? Magenta is a chord.

In music, a chord is two or more notes played at once. For example, the simplest form of a C-Major chord is just two notes: C and E. The C-Major chord cannot be represented by a single note.

Magenta is a chord in the same way, but instead of being C and E played together, it's composed of red and violet played together, and cannot be represented by a single wavelength.

What if there are other colors that we've never seen -- other colorful chords that can't be found in nature, but only by mixing natural colors?

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