Abstract:

Colors are part of the everyday life and, as such, make the human perception of the world rich of details and messages that could be barely delivered to our consciousness without such an incredible tool. Anyone loves colors, and this simple fact makes the physics behind them a perfect context to educate people to science, from kids up to adults. Photons are just impressive: at a fundamental level, they represent the mediator of the electromagnetic interaction, but they also compose the light rays allowing our vision and, at the same time, they are the fastest particles in the universe. Explaining their properties and the mechanism through which they produce, on our eyes and mind, the color sensation, is a fascinating way to track how the microscopic world speak to our macroscopic experience. However, while the translation from the photon wavelength to the color feeling is well understood, some mysterious fact persists. As an example, why magenta, that we can appreciate, e.g., when looking at some flowers and that is clearly part of our color list, doesn’t appear in the rainbow? Isn’t it the latter the full story about colors? In this talk, we will briefly introduce the physics beyond colors and will explain the mechanisms underlying the human vision. We will then face the “magenta” issue and will show how this color is an artifact of our mind (actually, magenta doesn’t exist!), the origin of which lies on the working principles of our eyes. We then move to a discussion of how colors can be exploited to educate people to scientific thinking. To conclude, we will present an innovative initiative being currently taken in the Italian Magenta municipality (that is named after the color itself!) by the Fucsina association (https://www.fucsina.it/) that, in cooperation with the Italian public research institutes Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche “Enrico Fermi” (https://cref.it/en/) and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (https://home.infn.it/it/) are organizing a series of events with the goal of making Magenta “The city of colors”, eventually culminating in the realization of an International Museum of Colors, so to make Magenta territory a perfect environment to educate people to art and science.

Keywords:

Colors, STEM, physics, outreach.