Rodney A. Brooks Quote

There is another reason why imaginary color is an appropriate tool for visualizing fields. You may be surprised to hear this, but the colors that we perceive in nature are also imaginary; they exist only in our minds. In nature there are no colors - only light waves of various frequencies. Even the vivid colors of a rainbow are not really there; the rainbow is created by water droplets that reflect light of different frequencies through different angles. It is in our brain, and only in our brain, that these signals are magically (and I do mean magically) translated into a perception of color.

Rodney A. Brooks

There is another reason why imaginary color is an appropriate tool for visualizing fields. You may be surprised to hear this, but the colors that we perceive in nature are also imaginary; they exist only in our minds. In nature there are no colors - only light waves of various frequencies. Even the vivid colors of a rainbow are not really there; the rainbow is created by water droplets that reflect light of different frequencies through different angles. It is in our brain, and only in our brain, that these signals are magically (and I do mean magically) translated into a perception of color.

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About Rodney A. Brooks

Rodney Allen Brooks (born 30 December 1954) is an Australian roboticist, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics. He was a Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Rethink Robotics (formerly Heartland Robotics) and currently is the co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Robust.AI (founded in 2019).