I don't really get the whole 'favorite color' thing. Or favorite
numbers. I've heard people mention their favorite numbers.
Numbers are a tool which convey information, that precious commodity
which we, as sentient beings, are fortunate enough to be capable of
assimilating, storing, processing and comprehending; a single number,
with no context or units, smacks of meaninglessness, utterly failing
as it does to fulfill its purpose. A slightly more sensible question
than "What is your favorite number?" would require a specification of
units: "What is your favorite distance?" Though the answer is certain
to depend on whether the object to be measured is a shoe or a
livingroom, at least it will have, once given, a meaning which we can
all understand--a step in the right direction, surely. Another version
is better still: "When measured from one end of a sandwich to the
other, what is your favorite distance?" This question, by including
additional information, has shed most of its annoying need for
clarification. I, however, would still like to know what's on the
sandwich.
This last question is very similar to the query at hand: "When
measured, in air, from one crest to the next of an electromagnetic
wave, what are people's favorite distances?" These wavelengths are
often referred to, for convenience, by alternative names--colors.
Typical preferences are in the vicinity of one hundredth the diameter
of a human hair, but rather than supply a favorite distance in the
form of a number and a unit (450 nanometers say, or 0.66 microns),
people generally choose a word (green say, or red), which, by general
agreement, vaguely specifies a certain range of distances. While none
of this is exactly illogical, the idea of a favorite color is
nonetheless perplexing because it usually arises, apparently, from the
assumption that individuals find certain distances (colors, if you
prefer) more beautiful than others.
But what is beauty? Beauty is an attribute of a set of information,
which, while subjective, is not typically deemed to describe very
simple systems. A thing we find beautiful, whether a flower, a
waterfall, or a face, usually contains far more information than can
easily be conveyed to another person. If all the information in a
beautiful sunset could be contained in a few words, there would be no
reason to see it after hearing it described. The ability of our eyes
to gather for us immense amounts of information, in which we may then
perceive beauty, derives mainly from their high spatial resolving
power. We can see the color and intensity of light arriving from
millions of different directions simultaneously. When these spatial
patterns change in time, information content grows still more. While a
photograph of a heron in flight may be beautiful, it cannot capture
the grace of the bird's motion. There is something ridiculous about
the proposition that '3-foot stick' (or any other object and distance,
such as '450-nanometer light') can be regarded as encoding anything of
beauty.
If we move from electromagnetic waves to acoustic ones, things are
much more rational. People seem not to suffer from the sort of
delusions that lead to 'favorite color' questions when it comes to the
distance between crests of a pressure wave. You've likely never been
asked, "So, young Igor (or Anton or Tabitha), what is your favorite
note? The E above middle C, perhaps, or maybe the B-flat below it?"
The spatial resolving power of our ears is poor. Often the best we can
do is to determine the direction from which a sound originates within
30 degrees or so. A person with visual resolution as poor would be
considered blind. Our sense of hearing, however, has one advantage
over sight: if multiple wavelengths of light enter the eye from a
single direction, we see only one color, a sort of an average; but we
can distinguish between multiple sounds coming from the same place at
the same time. The distinct sounds of many different instruments can
be heard though they're emanating simultaneously from a single
speaker. While this ability allows us to extract lots of information
from acoustic signals, the information gathering capicity of the ears
is still meager in comparison with that of the eyes. Perhaps for this
reason, sounds that are constant in time are rarely described as
beautiful. A steady unchanging hum, even if it's comprised of a number
of different sounds, like a musical chord, quickly becomes boring,
even annoying. There is no beautiful heron photograph in the world of
audio.
Favorite songs, favorite paintings, favorite actors--all these make
sense. But ask about favorite numbers or favorite colors and you enter
the realm of the illogical. |
