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This is the color of infinite hotness.

This is the color something gets in the limit where its temperature approaches infinity. Of course you’d instantly be fried by gamma rays of arbitrarily high frequency, but this would be its spectrum in the visible range.

This is also the color of a typical neutron star. They’re so hot they look the same!

It’s also the color of the very early Universe!

This was worked out by David Madore, and you can find the details at my blog article, including a discussion of whether this is exactly the right color:

johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2

Luckily, the alternative someone suggested is so close I can't tell the difference.

For computer screens and cell phones this color is approximately .

Perhaps we should call it "baby blue" - for the early universe.

Tony Vladusich

@johncarlosbaez

It's a trap, John!

The demonstration below does not use the same sRGB coordinates as Perano, but close enough to make the point that, properly speaking, "colour" (correctly spelled with a "u" 🤣) is most definitely a perceptual construct, not a physical one.

It is, of course, a cartoon version of the famous "dress" phenomenon, depicting how it is possible to perceive the same sRGB triplet as a cloth material that is either blue or white, depending on the surrounding context (source: wikidata.org/wiki/Q19362881).

There is no harm in disregarding the distinction ... until there is: which is to say that folks who construct theories of "colour perception" have generally been hopelessly seduced by the conflation of physics and perception.

I've written extensively about the problem and how we might collectively avoid such traps. But the trap is absurdly seductive!

@TonyVladusich - computing the spectrum of a blackbody at a given temperature is a really fun exercise for the likes of me: you've got quantum mechanics, the Riemann zeta function shows up, and so on. Converting the resulting light to rgb coordinates even in some mechanical way is too complicated for me, and the details of human color perception are waaaay above my pay grade. So this post was, in a sense, just click-bait. I wanted to post about something other than the demolition of the USA, and I recently got a comment on my old blog article on the color of infinite hotness, from someone who told me the unicode designation of the color shown here, so I thought: "people will like this, it's fun and not depressing even though in reality the radiation would kill you".

@johncarlosbaez

Haha, I get it. It’s why I keep posting about things that interest me too. Need to keep sane somehow.

Colour perception research needs folks like you, or at least folks like those who you’ve trained.

It most certainly is well below, not above, your pay grade! 😻