This semi-mad scientist (and former Doper) has demonstrated that we do see farther into the infrared than most of us ever notice. He also tells you how to do the same experiments for yourself.
Our brain is still used to interpreting the ordinary colors. So what you perceive of the IR using his methods still gets mapped (with unknowable semantics) into the conventional color palette we’re used to.
As Chronos said above, color is an eye/brain/mind phenomenon driven by a fundamentally different kind of frequency domain phenomenon that resides wholly in the realm of EMR and physics.
Wow, I’ve seen two-photon isomerization used with custom-designed sources and receptors for medical purposes, but I never realized that it’d been observed in natural biological processes.
It’s more meaningful than telling a blind person red is a certain wavelength. They actually experience heat and anger. The color qualia itself is beyond them, but they can still use temperature and emotional labels as part of their model of the world.
The guy behind my link, Bill Beatty, is an odd character to be sure. And his site is the result of a very active imagination and experimentation log accumulated over 15 years. Kinda like London’s road network, it wasn’t designed; it just happened. And here it sits today.
As such it has a crazed mad-cap almost logic to it. What it utterly lacks is regularly patterned organization.
But he’s no crank. His explanations of electricity go a long way to clarifying issues that baffle lots of Physics 200 students. Mostly because back in the old days they chose really woeful terminology that obscures as much as it informs.
You’ll learn some interesting stuff if you waste an afternoon on his site. Start with his “good stuff” link from the home page.
A while ago, I asked here something about wondering what “seeing the colors” of radio might be like.
And someone mentioned that, of course, in the longer wavelengths, our eyes and pupils would have to be huge in order for the waves to even allow the “light” through to hit our retinas. Just an interesting thought.
I can absolutely see further into the UV after my cataract surgery. In fact, my left eye has a different “model” of lens than my right eye. The left lens passes a lot of UV light, while the lens in the right eye seems to pass a spectrum similar to a natural lens.
The only time I notice (and how I discovered the situation) is when I am in a bar or amusement park ride or similar which uses “black lights” for special effects. From my right eye I see what you expect - glowing of any object which fluoresces or is painted with fluorescent paint. From my left eye the scene is brightly lit with what appear to be white light with a slight violet cast.
I did some Googling and the results seemed to confirm that Bausch and Lomb designed the lens that is in my left eye to pass UV, presumably to improve visual acuity, but when they designed the lens in my right eye (which includes astigmatism correction) they set the cutoff at a longer wavelength so less UV is passed.
Haunted house rides just aren’t that scary anymore…