Forgive me if my reasoning is based on flawed logic and information. I am no physics expert.
As I understand it when light strikes an object the energy of the photons is absorbed by the atoms that make up the object. An atom's electrons can only orbit its nucleus at one level or another, nothing in between. When the atom absorbs the photon, the electrons jump up another level before going back down again. When this happens a new photon is emitted by the atom, it's energy dictated by the level the electron fell. Once this photon enters the eye we perceive it as a color prepending on how much energy it has. This is the photoelectric effect.
In other words, when I turn on the light in my living room, the light hits my walls and is absorbed by the atoms in the purple paint. They tune the light to their own frequency, in a sense dye the light, and eject it out into the world. This is how we not only see in color but see at all.
Atoms that emit photons at very specific levels and only a finite number of levels, like cars have a finite number of gears and are either in one or another.
From this line of reasoning, I suspect that means there are a finite number of possible colors. That the spectrum we can see is quantized and not continuous. If light depends on the atoms in the physical matter to give them color and atoms can only emit photons at a fixed set of discrete frequencies based on what element they are, then it would follow there are a fixed, finite number of colors, of shades that could possibly exist in the universe.
Is this true? Is every photon that comes off an object the same? Does this apply to monitor too? Is every color we see part of a fixed pallet? Something predetermined and unchangeable? Like a cheap art program where you can only select from a list of preprogrammed colors? Is mixing paints, mixing atoms of various elements together make it continuous or is it still quantized and finite? It is said that color is a wavelength and a wavelength can be any length and there can be an infinite number of differences between 2 points if you make the integer small enough. So there can hypothetically be any wavelength, any color, any shade within the visible spectrum. But how can wavelengths be infinitely variable if they depend on atoms that can only emit wavelengths of certain colours?
I write this because I have always been a very creative person and this idea is very upsetting to me. And if it's a vast but finite number of colors it would still upset me. Without going into how human perception works, could you answer my question? This is very important to me so please, if you answer, make the argument intelligent and open-minded. I know that scientists sometimes talk about unproven things as if they are proven. I've never been able to pick up on that so if your answer is based on something that's still theoretical, please let me know because I tend to take things literally and think in absolutes. Someone talks about a theory like it's a truth and I can't help but assume it's already been proven beyond a doubt.
