Have you thought about colors in terms of dancing atoms?

I thought this was an interesting way to think of colors, from Quotation of the day mailing list:

"The best way I've found of understanding this [the way we see colors] is to think not so much something 'being' a color but of it 'doing' a color. The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering - or dancing or singing; the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe - in such a way that when white light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red - meaning paradoxically that the 'red' tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red. A week before, those atoms would have been doing a slightly different dance - absorbing the red light and rejecting the rest to give the appearance of a green tomato instead.
"I saw what I understand to be transitional color only once, on a journey to Thailand to undertake a ten-day fast. I was feeling good (although I had never realized it is possible to smell chocolate ice cream at 20 meters), and on day nine I was walking through a garden when suddenly I stopped in amazement. In front of me was a bougainvillea bush cove red in pink flowers. Only they were not pink, they were shimmering - almost as if a heartbeat had been transformed into something visible. I suddenly understood with my eyes and not just my mind how the phenomenon of color is about vibrations and the emission of energy. I must have stood there for five minutes, before I was distracted by a sound. When I looked back the bougainvillea had returned to being flowers, and nature had turned itself the right way round once more; it's usually easier that way. After I started eating, this never happened again."
- Victoria Finlay, in Color: A Natural History of the Palette.


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