I stand corrected!
If I was speaking as to only the content of color (which I guess could be intpreted that I did imply as much but did not mean) then this would be accurate;
White light contains light of all frequencies. In that sense, white is a combination of all colors. Black objects absorb light of all frequencies. This means that very little light is reflected from them. Black is the absence of light.
As far as the absence of color is concerned… you know that if you combine pigments or dyes of different colors, you don’t end up with white. Dyes and pigments work by absorbing light in certain frequency ranges, and
transmitting or reflecting light of other frequencies. If two different dyes are combined, the mixture absorbs light characteristic of BOTH dyes, and transmits light of the remaining frequencies. If you mix togtether dyes that are truly complementary, the mixture will absorb light of all
frequencies, and thus be black. (In practice the best you can do is get a muddy brown, because the different dyes are only approximately complementary.) So it depends on what you mean by “absence of color.”
We perceive colors because we have three types of “cone” cells in our retinas, each of which is most sensitive to certain frequency ranges. These ranges correspond pretty much to red, green, and blue. Our brain interprets the different intensities of the signals from each type of cone
cell to decide what color it sees.
I said “white is the absence of color, Black is all colors and gray is a muddy combination” or something to that effect. My fault for not implicitly stating it as a metaphor
