Life Without Color

[Jetter]

When I read a book called the Giver, it mentioned that the city there did not have a thing called color. This got me to start wondering what would life be like without color. Why would there not be color? Would there be light? How could there even be anything without color? Nothing to recognized, nothing to seperate. I guess that's why the elders didn't want color in the Giver. Please Discuss.

 

[TreeHuggerPanda]

OMG! I read that too! (It's a good book, but it's not one of my favorites)

Actually, my literature teacher told me that they can only see black and white, and maybe grey. There would be light, but not a natural light, like the sun.

And life without color would make everyone equal, there would be trade offs, though. Like no one will bully other people, but no one would have any individuality.

 

[LozzyKate]

Why would there not be color?

Alright, there wouldn't be color for this reason:

When the light passes into a material at an angle, the light beam is bent or refracted according to Snell's Law and the index of refraction of the material. But also, the speed of light through a material varies slightly with the wavelength or frequency of the light. Thus, each wavelength is refracted at a slightly different angle when passing through a material at an angle. This spreading out of the beam of light is called dispersion or chromatic dispersion. This can be seen when sunlight passes through a glass prism. When sunlight passes through a prism, it sends colors out from there. ROYGBV (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet) are the colors that are separated when white light shoots through a prism at an angle. You'll see a certain color depending on its wavelength. A wavelength is the distance between each wave. If the wave are closer together, then there is a high frequency and high energy, thus giving you the colors blue or violet. And it is the opposite when seeing red or orange. It continues on like that.

So basically, this is happening:

That's why there wouldn't be color if this wasn't happening.

(I love science...so I just had to answer this this way. )

 

[Baysiderulez]

Alright, there wouldn't be color for this reason:

When the light passes into a material at an angle, the light beam is bent or refracted according to Snell's Law and the index of refraction of the material. But also, the speed of light through a material varies slightly with the wavelength or frequency of the light. Thus, each wavelength is refracted at a slightly different angle when passing through a material at an angle. This spreading out of the beam of light is called dispersion or chromatic dispersion. This can be seen when sunlight passes through a glass prism. When sunlight passes through a prism, it sends colors out from there. ROYGBV (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet) are the colors that are separated when white light shoots through a prism at an angle. You'll see a certain color depending on its wavelength. A wavelength is the distance between each wave. If the wave are closer together, then there is a high frequency and high energy, thus giving you the colors blue or violet. And it is the opposite when seeing red or orange. It continues on like that.

So basically, this is happening:

That's why there wouldn't be color if this wasn't happening.

(I love science...so I just had to answer this this way. )

You are a very smart girl, I can tell from your post, that you know your material... But the only prism between us and the sun right now is the Earth's Atmosphere. It is indeed a good theory though, I suppose the giver's story could take place on a land with no atmosphere or one that was unable to work as a prism, but I am going to approach this question from a linguistic cultural anthropology perspective.

Languages do not translate exactly from culture to culture. Color is a good example of this. In American culture we distinguish 6 basic colors and give words to all of them: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. Another culture develops it's language and they say that blue and green and red and purple are not different enough to need separate words, so they give names to 4 basic colors. Red, orange, yellow, and blue. This is a language difference. The people with the second language are not going to be able to be as specific as the one with the 6 colors. If they say blue, then the concept of blue could be teal, sky blue, green, sea green… ect. And so when you are describing things to people it becomes more complicated. The more words you give a language the more abstract the ideas can become. This translates into the idea that our language shapes our perspective. This is because if we are given a vast amount of words to apply to concepts we can create abstract ideas, like hovering cars. If we are not given the words to express the concept then the concept can not be explored. There's not a way for us to express it out loud to others. Nor a practical way for it even to cognate.

Its been a while since I've read the giver, but I believe when I read it, it was to explore their government (it was for my US History class). The idea of shaping peoples perspective is a way for the government to become more in control of the general public's thought, and over all control each individual. The idea of them not being able to "see" color may not be so much that they cannot physically see color, more as though they cannot "understand" color, because they have not been given a way to express it.

Its very much the same way Big Brother, in 1984 limits thoughts by decreasing the size of the dictionary each year... and using different words of good ( doubleplusgood, good, ungood, doubleplusungood) to describe all levels of the same emotion and its opposite. Something that is ungood... how is that compared to Good... We just don't know. As with the english language was have been given words like "bad, horrible, atrocious, awful" to describe in detail the absolute level of badness.

Basically not to stray to far from the purpose of this thread. I believe there is 'no color' because the elders did not want to allow the people the independent thought that color allows. The world is full of color, but they are ignorant to it because they haven't been taught that there are different colors for each shade. In their minds it all appears as one.

 

[ancazur]

TreeHuggerPanda is right: It would basically be life in greyscale. That way everyone's equal. From what I recall, they also didn't sing or anything. I kind of want to believe all their voices sounded similar, too, but I don't remember any proof of that. (It wasn't all that long ago that I read it.)

It's really a fantastic book. I don't know why I didn't read it when I was younger.

 

[athenian200]

Why wouldn't there be color? Very simple. It's not necessary to change the laws of physics. There is such a thing as colorblindness. Many animals cannot see in color. Color does not exist, or at least has no meaning, if you cannot perceive it. I've heard that essentially, it would be like old monochrome televisions.

However, I don't agree that people would be more equal if everyone were colorblind. Racism would still take place, it just wouldn't go by skin color. We would go by facial features or something. In fact, some Asians have the same skin tone as Caucasians, yet some people are still racist against them because of their "slanted eyes" or something. There's no fundamental difference between the mentality of people who can see color, and those who can't.

People who can see color often use it as a metaphor for emotion, and depict a monochrome world as a dead, depressing one, devoid of passion or meaning. It's also used to represent being stuck in the past, while the future is represented in color... that's the direct influence of color television. If we'd never had monochrome televisions, that symbolism probably wouldn't exist.

But as far as the literary theme of the book, I think it's roughly the same as the theme of "Pleasantville." Basically, it's supposed to be a metaphor for representing a bland world that is very peaceful and safe, yet lacking in meaning and choice.

 

[TheGreen]

Science talk,but I'll try to be concise:
Color (as we perceive it) is generated from a fairly source of electro magnetic radiation (the sun) hitting a surface where some is absorbed and some is reflected into our eyes.

As I see it there are the following parts:
Source>Surface>Eye
or
Source> Eye

If the source is projecting equal amounts of each wavelength of visible light then we get a white light. This is the only option if we are to have a lack of color.
The objects in this city have to be of a certain composition so that their pigments absorb each wavelength of light equally. Not usually the case, but yes it's possible to make everything greyscale.
The eye i think, is where the color is lost. Cones are more receptive to color while rods perceive contrast in grey scale. Perhaps these people have lost their cones! Or they're genetically altered, but if it's just one city I dunno what's going on so ya.

 

[arkvoodle]

I'm not going to go into detail, as most of the science that I was going to give as evidence was already posted.

But in terms of normal everyday life, I don't think it would have any effect if all of humanity was colorblind. It would just be a genetic defect if a person ended up being able to see in color.

Life would continue on as normal. Racism, violence and everything else would still exist, only it would be over nationality (as it is today) or how tall/small you are or some other unimportant detail.

to the people who could see in color, the world would be very different. No-one else could talk to the person about certain things except for those who could see in color-o-vision

 

[Jetter]

All of these posts were great!

@Jo This was an idea I thought would also make sense. In fact after reading it I was thinking why I didn't think of it when I was making this thread.

@THP This was an idea that I thought is very possible in the book,but didn't understand. How could they see in that grey scale unless they are not ordinary humans.

For some reason an idea popped in my head, why not just give the people some sort of drug that makes it so a person could not see the colors corectly and only see the shade of grey.

 

[TreeHuggerPanda]

@THP This was an idea that I thought is very possible in the book,but didn't understand. How could they see in that grey scale unless they are not ordinary humans.

Color was taken out of the city/town/whatever. So they can probably see on a grey scale, but not colors like red or blue. They are ordinary humans, because... well, I don't wanna spoil the last book, so yeah...

 

[Jetter]

Color was taken out of the city/town/whatever. So they can probably see on a grey scale, but not colors like red or blue. They are ordinary humans, because... well, I don't wanna spoil the last book, so yeah...

Wait Wait Wait. There is a last book. What do you mean?

 

[TreeHuggerPanda]

Wait Wait Wait. There is a last book. What do you mean?

Actually, it's a companion book. It slightly hints elements of the Giver. The next one is called Gathering Blue, then the next one is The Messenger.

 

[Cel-Shaded Deku]

Life without color... In a modern society we have things like traffic signals and even in video games such as the color dungeon in Link's Awakening. Life would be very different indeed. In the Giver I don't think color was needed as much but that ability to see in color probably would have had a more positive effect on their lifestyle. And whether or not there's color, discrimination will remain.

 

[Baysiderulez]

Life without color... In a modern society we have things like traffic signals

Well yes traffic signals are colored, but does it really matter if they're colored, not really. There are 3 lights... Top Middle and Bottom... No matter what the top one means stop. The bottom one means Go. Regardless of being able to see color you can use traffic lights without issue.

I still think it's about the government controlling language in order to control thought and more so to control the people. Not anything genetic. Our perspective shapes our reality. If we can narrow our perspective then our reality will be far smaller as well.

 

[Ninten*]

That was a really good book. I read it in my English class last year and it said it wanted to 'protect' people from harmful choices. I think their vision of it would be like a 50's TV show or something like that. Once the Reciever got memories, he/she would get color because of memories from long ago. In 'The Giver' Giver said that their genetisists were getting better at it. When it started with some people, then when they had children, they were colorblind and it kept happening until the events of the story.