This Used To Be A Funhouse, But Now It's Full Of Evil Clowns

Pink.

Is it really a color? I mean, really? When you get right down to it?

According to one Robert Krulwich of the public-radio program Radiolab, pink does not exist. We've just made it up. He cites this edition of something called Minute Physics:



So, no pink. Just a red/violet combination that doesn't actually exist in the rainbow.

I might not have seen this save for the fact that Time picked it up and it is currently the most popular item on their site. In Time's article, the dissenting voice comes from Michael Moyer of Scientific American, who they note that all color, rainbow or not, is merely a product of our brains.

They do not note that he also says that you don't get any color whatsoever by attaching the two ends of the wavelength spectrum to each other. You don't get a mix of red and violet. You get a mix of infrared and ultraviolet, both of which are invisible. Not that you can do such a thing as attach the two ends of a wavelength spectrum in the first place.

Let me try to attack this there-is-no-pink thing from a different angle.

THAT'S NOT PINK, YOU DOLT, THAT'S MAGENTA!

That's your 'minus green'. That's why your printer uses 'cyan' and 'magenta' and not red and blue. Magenta absorbs green light; yellow (or at least a specific shade of light yellow) absorbs blue light; cyan absorbs red light.

Pink is technically between red and violet. That part is fine. But it's also between red and magenta. Or, if one chooses, between red and white, as any kid with crayons could tell you. Or between all three.

Oh, and by the way, even if it were in fact pink that was just the leftovers of white light when you take out the green.... YOU JUST ADMITTED THAT PINK EXISTS, YOU DOLT!