stephenWells
Posts: 127
Joined: April 2006
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We're all familiar with the Disco institute's "Explanatory filter." That's the one which goes: if not law, and if not chance, then design.
Inspired by the clarity and logical rigour of this, I would like to propose an equally telling insight in the field of Optics: the Colour Filter.
Our starting point is the observation that the primary colours of light are Red, Blue and Green. Just look at the phosphors on your TV screen. This allows me to conclude that:
Blue is the set-theoretic complement of Red and Green.
Which leads us to the Colour Filter, a rigorously scientific method of discovering what colour something is:
If it's Red, conclude Red.
If it's Green, conclude Green.
If it's neither red nor green, conclude Blue.
I tested this filter thoroughly by looking at a tomato (it was Red) and a lawn (it was Green). Having proved that Red and Green objects are correctly identified, I now know that the filter works.
Some of the results I received were rather surprising- for example, I had never realised that carrots and oranges were Blue. But the filter makes it perfectly clear. Also, all of my clothes are now the same colour, so everything matches.
A particularly interesting case is the middle light on the traffic lights as I was driving in to work today. It's clearly Blue according to the filter, but a policeman was very insistent that it was, in fact, Yellow.
I was confused at first, since the filter has no such category as Yellow. On getting to work, I immediately made some enquiries among my colleagues in optics. Imagine my surprise to find that there is no scientific consensus regarding Yellow! Yes, while some scientists insisted that Yellow could be made by the mixing of Red and Green, others were equally insistent that it could be a single colour all to itself- the first group waved insistently at their computer monitors, while the second indicated a sodium street-lamp just outside the window. (Since the lamp was clearly Blue, according to the filter, I didn't see how it helped them at all).
Even stranger, the two groups also claimed that they weren't really disagreeing with each other at all, and that really they all agreed about Yellow- in fact, that there were two different kinds of Yellow! Well, obviously that didn't fool me for a second- it was clear that Yellow was simply a conspiracy, and they couldn't even keep their story straight. Really, I felt quite proud of myself that with my simple Filter I'd gained more insight into optics than any of these people with their fancy degrees and laboratories.
They even presented all kinds of charts and graphs from something called a spectroscope, which they claimed showed both kinds of Yellow; one kind had spectral peaks in Red and Green, and the other was just a single peak. But I didn't find this at all convincing. Firstly, this whole business of two kinds of Yellow is obviously ridiculous. Secondly, all of this spectroscopy had been carried out by Yellowists- none of them had ever used my Filter or understood the real nature of Blue! So clearly all their results were biased and simply reflected their own beliefs and desired. I still don't understand why they're so insistent about Yellow, when the Filter makes it clear that Blue is so much simpler and more obvious.
Then I realised that many of them were atheists, or agnostics, or members of various religions which I don't agree with. Checking my Bible, I found that light was God's first creation. Therefore, it can only be studied by people who have the right attitude to God- like me, for example- and naturally all those Godless scientists like Newton and Descartes could never have understood it the way I do. All current scientists are simply repeating the conventional wisdom about "spectra" and "colours" and are blinded by their atheistic materialistic assumptions.
Finally, I would like to stress that the Filter is completely scientific and objective and has nothing to do with religion. I haven't yet published anything on it, or used it to achieve anything, but I think it should immediately be introduced into primary-school art classes.
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