• Question: If all colors can be started from the three primary colors, what was the first colour to appear during the "Big Bang"?

    Asked by tosty55 to Aggelos, Andrew, Eileen, Naomi, Shane on 16 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: Eileen Diskin

      Eileen Diskin answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      That’s a great question. I would guess that at first, there was no colour. This is because for us to see colours, we need light. And when the universe was first created with the big bang there was no light, because there had to be the right kind of particles that give us light (these are called photons).

      The very early universe was too hot, and too dense for these kinds of particles to exist. But as it started to cool, particles like photons were able to exist. This all happened VERY quickly, however – scientists guess that within about 10 seconds, photons existed…but because the universe was still very dense, it probably took a while for light to ‘shine’. And with that…there were colours!

      I would guess that all three primary colours appeared at the same time, though I’m not sure. Photons give us different colours because of their different levels of energy, which gives them different frequencies. These different frequencies means that they have different wavelengths – and its these wavelengths that give us the different colours.

      Hope that makes a bit of sense!

    • Photo: Naomi Elster

      Naomi Elster answered on 16 Nov 2012:

      I don’t know – not sure anyone does! I imagine it would have been black, as black is actually what you get when you mix every colour together. It’s likely that everything was black until the big bang and slightly after it, and it was only some time after the big bang that the universe spread out enough for distinct colours to appear. But I don’t know which of these would have been first.

    • Photo: Andrew Jackson

      Andrew Jackson answered on 21 Nov 2012:

      Ok, so to answer this we need to think about the physiology of sight. The fact that the three primary colours, red green and blue can combine to produce any colour in between is down to our eyes and how they detect light. We have three types of cells that are good are responding to the primary colours (and another type for black and white contrasts). these cells react and send a signal to our brain when light with a certain wavelength falls on our eyes – they get most excited when the light is close in colour to what we call primary colours. When these are stimulated together in combination, our brain mixes the combined signal to allow us to perceive it as one of the intermediate colours.

      What this means is that colour perception is a very human specific thing, and indeed different people perceive colours slightly differently because our cells in our eyes react slightly differently to light. Utlimately this means that primary colours only exist in the definitoins of humans. During the big bang, there would have been all sorts of radiation produced, including electromagnetic radiation that is within the colour spectrum of humans.

      So i guess visible light would have been there right from the beginning in some shape or form, but the idea of primary colours has no meaning outside the realm of human perception of light.

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