"Thanks so much for your lecture the other week. It was brilliant. The topics were presented in a clear and methodical way with a large dose of wit and plenty of fascinating, mind-bending demonstrations."
"Brilliant lecture, delivered with the right information/humour balance - should be compulsory for all schools."
This talk was created when I held the Teaching Fellowship of the Colour Group UK in 2008-2009. It is a demonstration-based talk about the science of colour. I've given this talk, with remarkably minor variations, to audiences ranging in age from about 9 upwards, including adults. As well as the Colour Group, subsequent funders for this talk have been the Royal Institution and Glasgow University Science Festival.
I have been reappointed by the Colour Group as Teaching Fellow for the year 2011-12. The Fellowship will come to an end after that.
The three themes of the talk are:
- What is it about light and the way it behaves that makes colour vision even possible?
- What is it about our eyes and brains that enable us to distinguish the different kinds of light from each other, ie, to see in colour?
- Why is it useful to a creature to be able to see in colour? Why is it advantageous to a creature or plant to be coloured, and why do people use colour?
Along the way, we touch on physics, physiology and evolutionary biology. We find out how our eyes detect light, why we have reason to be jealous of pigeons, and why we are all colour blind.
The talk includes the following demonstrations. Nearly all of the demonstrations are presented "live".
- Newton's first experiment with a prism.
- Flame colours.
- Metameric illuminants demonstration. (Please note that the demonstration described in the link is not yet the lecture-scale demonstration that I actually use.)
- Mixing of coloured lights (additive colour mixing).
- Colour aftereffect using red and green patches to generate afterimages.
- The Bidwell effect. (Please note that the demonstration described in the link is not yet the lecture-scale demonstration that I actually use.)
- Simultaneous colour contrast.
- The checkershadow effect.
- The grey squares demonstration..
- Blackness is not the absence of light.
- How to make a black thing look white by taking light away.