[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by Spacemonkey

Peacegirl, given your current answers I have three stories of light for you to consider.

Story 1: The sun emits some light which, along with all the light of other wavelengths, contains red light which travels towards the ball. The ball is red, so (this means) it absorbs all the other light, reflecting only our red light which bounces off and heads towards the camera. The photograph happens to be taken when this red light arrives at the camera, so the shutter opens as the red light arrives and this red light hits the film resulting in a red photograph of the red ball.

Do you have any problems with this story?

Story 2: The sun emits some light which, along with all the light of other wavelengths, contains blue light which travels towards the ball. The ball is blue, so (this means) it absorbs all the other light, reflecting only our blue light which bounces off and heads towards the camera. The photograph happens to be taken when this blue light arrives at the camera, so the shutter opens as the blue light arrives and this blue light hits the film resulting in a blue photograph of the blue ball.

Do you have any problems with this story?

Story 3: The sun emits some light which, along with all the light of other wavelengths, contains red light which travels towards the ball. The ball is red, so (this means) it absorbs all the other light, reflecting only our red light which bounces off and heads towards the camera. However, the ball changes color from red to blue immediately after reflecting this red light towards the camera (and therefore before our red light gets to the camera). So the ball was red when the red light hit it and bounced off towards the camera, but is blue (i.e. has begun absorbing red light and reflecting only blue light) during the time this previously reflected red light is in transit between the ball and the camera. The photograph happens to be taken when this red light arrives at the camera, so the shutter opens as the red light arrives and this red light hits the film resulting in a red photograph of the blue ball.

Where does this story go wrong, according to your version of what is happening?

I can see where the problem is. The image at the camera could not be blue if the light was first red because, according to science, photons are packets of light energy that aren't connected to each other and are coming out of the factory as separate entities. Therefore, they strike the film in the order in which they arrived.