Light & Color

Shadow Colors

At SHADOW COLORS, visitors find out that shadows may seem to be colors they’re not—even though shadows have no colors at all. These exhibits also illustrate how our brains make choices about what to see. Colored light focuses on a wire loop that projects a shadow on a screen. The color of the shadow appears to change depending on the color of the light. But the wire blocks the colored lights, so no colored light reaches the screen in the wire's shadow. The area in the shadow is lit only by the white light from above.