RGB light doesn't make white ... apparently! 

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These two are the definition of “echo chamber”, one is saying something the other one is repeating 😂

As a theatre lighting designer and set designer I shall repeat to pete and peter that 'Light isn't the same as paint'.

Ok. . . when P & P got to the whole "banana's are yellow, but they're not moving" part in their vid, I couldnt' help but think they've GOT to be trolling their audience!

I'd be very interested to see, how Peter&Pete would explain white light being split into colors through a glass prism, if they don't belive that white light is made up of other colors...

Technology Connection told that RGB white is different from sunlight white, but at least he had a point. Because the missing frequencies in RGB lamps, objects, what reflect only very specific wavelengths, can look weird.

When they got to the banana bit it started to feel like a comedy sketch

Thank God Pete and Peter haven't tackled green bananas turning yellow over time. Obviously it's because they are curved and not flat. Great video 👍 (except for the outro)

P&P aren't just confused about how light works .... pretty much everything in reality confuses them ... their 'in our opinion' videos are comedy gold 🤣

Another thing to note about led light is that an led of a certain color, ONLY EMITS THAT PURE COLOR. An OLED display is not filtering a white backlight like an LCD screen does. So their "washed out" argument falls apart as soon as any direct view LED screen is used.

Remember, Peter and Pete think clouds are made of salt

So if I shine three blue lights in this same way, do I get white light (according to Peter and Pete's logic) where the three blues merge together due to the triple blue intensity? I'm going to say no, and I'll just get blue light.

9:15 - Actually, yellow surfaces COULD be reflecting red and green and absorbing yellow wavelengths. Most of the time this doesn't happen, but you would never know unless you used a prism to split the light to see what bands the surface is reflecting. This is why lightbulb CRI matters. Because light bulbs can emit a non-continuous or uneven spectrum which might be okay for some types of materials but not others. I once used florescent light bulbs that made some green clothes look unnaturally vivid. If I brought it to sunlight, it looked very muted green.

I can not believe that Pete and Peter is anything else than a parody of 70's kids TV.

I am thoroughly convinced that they are putting us on... but I always love a good science breakdown, Thanks for the color theory lesson Dave 👍

3:15 I actually laughed out loud at “these bananas aren’t moving” I’m soooo glad that you watch these muppets so I don’t have to! I really hope they are just trolling and not that stupid.

White light only consumes more power on OLED displays, LCD displays have backlight that always creates the same amount of white light which is then blocked by the LCD so same amount of power is used no matter what is being displayed (assuming SDR display, HDR varies the amount of backlight, and there is tiny amount of energy used to twist the LCD crystals, so technically there is small difference in power used depending on the image displayed)

It's so cute how Peter & Pete finish each other's sentences. What a charming married couple they make.

FFS don't tell Peter and Pete about the good old days with film cameras when we had to use colour temperature meters and 81 type filters for colour correction.

I don't know why but everytime I hear someone explaining light and how it interacts with our eyes and brain I get goosebumps. Never ceases to amaze me how complex and interesting the human body is.

Those ID:10T's will be having their mind blown if they hear about SUBSTRACTIVE (usually CMY+K) color mixing done in printing (for example) in contrast to ADDITIVE mixing done with TV's or used in cameras (usually RGB/BGR) :D

I'm going to go buy a Nikon P1000 and zoom in on a banana to see if I can resolve the tiny spinning red and green disks. 😂

Tangentially related: I did an experiment where I looked at a bright red light source in order to tire my red receptors (L-Cones) and then switched to looking at green light source shone on a white wall. Where the bright red LEDs had been in my vision, I was hoping to see a color I had never seen before (hyperbolic green). The experiment worked, I really did see a color I had never seen before, but I would have called it a variation of blue, not 'green'. I had a neighbor try to same experiment and her description was effectively identical (a color she had never seen, and she would call it blue)

Pete&Peter's deadpan delivery is what puts them in the top tier of Po.

Peter and Pete are the proof that if you put some heads together, you might well hear a hollow noise.

13:41 most screens actually work by obscuring light emitted from a diffuse backlight which means even tho you're displaying black the backlight is still on

I've always believed that the fact that these bananas aren't moving is the real problem.

The most delicious irony is that any banana viewed digitially absolutey IS made up of red, green, and blue and contain absolutely no yellow, regardless of what bananas are doing in the real world.

This would be just so easy to test. Take a red, a green and a blue light that you can individually adjust for "intensity". The "voltage" that is put in. Simple. And then shine only one of these colours at a surface. Increase the power. If the P&P hypothesis was correct, the light would turn to white at some point. Regardless of whether you used to red, green or blue light... each for have to result in the same "white", if you just put in enough power. Then use the three lights, set up like in the first experiment. Use a _low_ amount of power to input... and marvel at the mixing colours. Very simple experiment to do, to test your idea before you show yourself as ignorant on the WorldWideWeb.

I just realized how far technology has come. After seeing all these pixels magnified and then realizing that this pixels are on your phone screen so small you almost can't see them individually. 🤯 This amazes me every time.

As a welder, I have some input on this. The diodes in your screen do not have enough brightness to make the colors “wash out”, or make them so bright that it only appears white. In welding, we do see that sort of intensity. The electric arcs we work around are technically a violet/blue color, but their brightness is so intense that the center appears white. The difference is, the electric arc is _so bright_ that we have to wear protective headgear to shield our eyes, because staring at it can cause rapid damage to your corneas. You have to cover up around it to prevent sunburn, even. And it can do this from 30+ feet away, despite the inverse square law, which says light decreases in intensity over distance. Your screen is nowhere near bright enough to do that, so that means the color you are seeing on your screen is, in fact, actually white and not “blown out.”

"In our opinion..." Validity of claim summarised in 3 words.

The heat spot causing white is instantly disproved by just using 3 of the same colour light. If 3 overlapping red lights don't create white then the colour must be valid

I can't help but think the Peter and Pete channel is satirical. I mean, nobody can be this delusional, right?

I think P & P are being satirical. I laughed at the banana are yellow even though they are not spinning green and yellow.

With most LCD panels white will use the least power. In practice it's hardly much because the back light is always lit.

Mr. Mckeegan, You are a great teacher along with my father. He worked at Teletype his whole life and also fixed television sets on the side. He would bring me and show me with a magnifying glass that color television is made out of red green and blue pixels. I miss pops!

imagine what the dog is thinking when he is talking about colors he has never even seen before

If the colors from 3 LED's are so intense that it washes out and turns white, then it shouldn't matter what color those LEDs are. So if you shine 3 blue lights on the same spot, you should get white. This doesn't happen. You just get more blue light.

I seriously think they are having us on.

Is really like to hear these guys take on how brown is actually just dark orange.

Imagine how many pixels a mantis shrimp’s TV would have to use in order to recreate their world 😱

Oh, those guys! I've had a pleasure of being a target of one of their videos 😁

One needs to remember that mixing color has different result in the case of mixing light and mixing paint. The combination of colors which gives you white in the case of light will result in black (or very close to it) in the case of paints. This is because in the case of paints you do not fill gaps in light spectrum but rather in absorption spectrum (parts of the spectrum which do not reflect any light).

2:27 There you have it folks. "In our opinion". That's all they have, their opinions. No scientific explanations or reasoning to back up their claims. No repeatable tests or experimentation. Just their own "common sense" to validate their own beliefs.

I have RGB LED lights in my home. I also have objects that are yellow, pink, and orange. Under a green light, those objects are ALL green. Under a purple light, bananas appears orange. Only other light sources remain the same color.

3:14 "But these bananas aren't moving." Oh ... my ... god. Yep he nailed it the bananas aren't moving, so how can they be yellow? Wow. Are they really that dumb?

Most of what I learned about color vision was from the Feynman lectures, Book 1, Chapter 35 named, you guess it, "Color vision". It is easy to find (legally) online. It was even before I started studying physics. Later on, this topic must have been deemed so obvious by my Physics 101 professor that he just mentioned adding up colors in his lecture without much detail, learning aids or an experiment. At least I do not remember it, unlike the Feynman chapter.

Obviously if you spin the banana it will appear to have red and green stripes

I literally facepalmed myself alone in my room at the bananas argument. My god.

Get well soon, Physics Girl! I'm convinced P&P are one guy doing some clever editing to make himself seem like twins. 😂 Probably not but it's funny to think about. They just say the first thing that comes to their head and run with it as an explanation. I think they're Poes.

Lmmfao, I had to replay the beginning, I kinda repeated it in my head as thank, but it wasn't sitting right, so I went back, yeah nope. It wasn't thank. 🤣 Love @Planarwalk 's videos. Wait till he introduces you to ken wheeler. 😭 Edit: 3:08 :(( @Physics Girl get well soon Dianna, we're all rooting for you. 💕

I think we should try shining a light into one of their ears and measuring what comes out the opposite ear 😂.

It would be more correct to say that the RGB levels detected by our eye _determine_ the color we perceive, rather than that these levels allow us to detect true color. If our eyes had different pigments, or more pigments (say, RYGBV), or fewer pigments (as in color blindness) we would categorize various incoming spectra differently, and possibly into more or fewer distinct shades of color. Keep in mind that for any specific shade of color, there are many (infinitely many) different combinations of frequencies which will be detected as that color (like a "red" frequency + a "green" frequency will look like a particular shade of yellow, but there is a pure single "yellow" frequency that will look like that exact same shade of yellow, and many other combinations of multiple precise frequencies will all look like the same yellow). Some colors, like purple, not to mention white and grey, do not have any single frequency that by itself is perceived as that color.

1:50 so cute when couples finish each other phrases 😍

At 10:15, your cameras computer does not see anything as 'yellow'. It sees a value for red and a value for green (and 0 for blue). This gets carried through (although maybe compressed into a palette) until it is displayed, at which point your brain sees it as yellow.

Wow, you two are being _very_ generous to Peter & Pete in this video -- I'd personally that _everything_ seems to confuse them, because the two of them seem to be thick as bricks.

It's just so entertaining to watch these guys talk over each other saying the same thing. Like.... Do they plan it? Or is it that they have spent literally every second of their lives together?

Fun fact about RGB light sources and reflecting that light vs looking directly at those sources (like a monitor): While RGB is completely adequate for monitors because of the reasons described in the video, it is not all that good for reflected light. In fact, when an RG light source attempts to illuminate a yellow banana, for example, that banana won't look quite right, because the light is almost but not quite perfectly reflected. It's a similar reason why "store lighting" doesn't look quite as the same as "outdoor lighting", despite them both being "white". So to adjust for this inability of RGB lighting to not illuminate certain "between" colors as well (which is very important to do, by the way, in stage lighting and this deficiency is why many lighting designers prefer older incandescent sources with color filters over newer LED lights), the manufacturers of these RGB light fixtures are starting to expand the LED arrays into new colors: the most common is a dedicated White LED (Warm, Cool, Neutral), followed by Amber. Less common but coming more into use are other colors like Lime, Indigo, and Deep Red, and UV. All these new colors to hit those sections of the spectrum missed by RGB arrays and "pop out" more colors, providing a richer, more saturated look in the objects being illuminated due to the fact that the actual wavelengths are being reflected rather than a mix of wavelengths that are approximating the color. (So now you've got arrays like RGB, RGBW, RGBA, RGBAWUV... one of the most advanced arrays is in the ETC Source4 Lustr 3, with RGBAILCDr (Red, Green, Blue, Amber, Indigo, Lime, Cyan, Deep Red), which, theoretically, should produce enough individual wavelengths across the spectrum that it would be hard to distinguish between a mix of wavelengths for a color approximation vs the specific wavelength of the color.

If you told Pete and Peter that their excrement doesn't taste good, maybe they'll taste it to prove that it's tastes great?

0:29 loving the dog face the moment that s/he stared at the camera 😍

I think Peter&Pete are fairly smart. Not science-smart, but RU-vid smart. They know there's a market for flat-earthers, and they know science kills the flat earth, so "science has to be lying". If science is lying about the shape of the earth, it can be lying about anything else! So, they make a channel, they look for "alternative" reasons for stuff that science had the facts for hundreds of years, and publish videos. It's win-win-win: They construct the argument that science is lying, they give "examples" for flat earthers that science is lying, and they make a video (profit). Also, they don't need to think too hard nor do experiments, just rambling is enough, as everyone knows that flat earthers and science deniers will blind-trust what already confirms their beliefs while if exposed to anything that debunks them they will make a little crab spin dance with their hands on their ears shouting "la la la I CAN'T HEAR YOU la la la CGI la la la BIG CORP SHILL la la la SHOO LUCIFER SHOO! la la la".

"and it's incredibly dim" - just like Peter and Pete.

Well, strictly speaking, they aren't wrong. Red, Green and Blue doesn't make white light. It looks white to us because of how our eyes work. If you feed that 'white' light through a prism, you won't get the usual rainbow, you'll only see the constituent colour bands. This video does a decent job to distinguish between the actual spectrum of the light vs how we see it.

"A banana is yellow, not red and green. Therefore red and green can't make yellow." - Peter and Pete trying their hand at logic again.

No such thing as white light; only combinations of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation that excite the cones in our retinas in proportions that we perceive as white. Most of our color technology (printing, cameras, screens, digital image formats, etc) is highly specific to how human vision works and fails to capture the whole story.

Some years ago when I did and electronics tech apprenticeship (like 1979), discussions on colour video and the related standards where we could see the RBG guns (at that time CRT's were a large vacuum tube with an electron "gun" per colour) mixing to give various "whites" from warm orangy ones to the harsher bluish whites.

I am fairly sure they don't believe any of the stuff they spout on their channel. I made a comment on one of their "chemistry" videos and they responded with, "Remember, this is all satire."

Bananas are yellow? It seems like the ones I buy from the store, they are always either green or brown. The fabled yellow banana never survives long enough to actually eat them in the prime of their ripeness

Wait, this isn't Professor Dave Explains...

It might be more accurate to say that equal amounts of red, blue and green mix to make neutral, or grey if you prefer. The same is true of the complementary colours yellow, magenta and cyan. If that is not true, then the last 45 years I have spent as a photographic colour (and b/w) printer have been some kind of delusion that has nevertheless made my living.

As a comedy duo they remind me a bit of Pete and Dud!

His notion of “washed out colours” is on par with whole “can’t feel the Earth moving” thing. Troubling stuff indeed.

As someone who worked in computer graphics and imaging for nearly a decade, requiring me to intimately understand the components of color, various color spaces, and how the eye perceives hue, saturation, and brightness, Peter and Pete's explanations of light and color deeply offend me. It's OK to be ignorant of something if you haven't studied it, but it's another thing to treat that ignorance as though it's knowledge and to try to promote that ignorance as "truth". They seriously need to get out of their almost-literal echo chamber. Thanks for debunking their pseudoscience.

ALSO, RE - The Spinning top (Red/Green - Dianna)... We DON'T see the individual colours as the top is spinning because they are spinning TOO FAST for our eyes to perceive. Put it this way... Shine a torch into your eyes for a couple of seconds (NOT a bright/Ultra bright one) and then, take the torch away... HOW LONG does it take for your eyes to readjust to see normally again. OR.. Walk from a brightly lit room into a VERY DARK room (as quick as you can) and then tell me how quick your eyes readjust to see more in that dark room?? It takes a few seconds. THAT'S WHY you can ONLY see INDIVIDUAL colours painted on a spinning top UP TO a certain point. It's how a CRT TV worked (aka 'The Slow Mo Guys' showed in their video.... So Peter and Pete... LEARN ACTUAL SCIENCE!!! 😎🇬🇧

Another fine example of the trend of them going, "Don't listen to them, they just made that stuff up. Listen to me, and the stuff I made up".

I remember looking really, really close at the tv when I was a kid and seeing the little red, green, blue rectangles.

A lot of people have claimed that P and P are Poes. I'm not sure if they are or not, but it sure isn't hard to believe that they might be.

A very good explanation video without massively taking the piss out of those two.

I will personally record you some new music to cleanse your palate.

I've always liked the quote from the Captain Disilusion Video: Why bother imitating reality, when you can imitate an apes perception of reality for 1/3rd the cost

Interestingly, the "red" cones also absorb in the short wavelength end of the "blue" part of the spectrum, which is why red+blue appears (violet) purple! This absorption band is often left off the absorption spectra of the cones.

"but these bananas...aren't moving." words to live by.

A point can be made that rgb only appears white but is far from it, but that's not it. The point would be that because it only has the three colours instead of the full range, trying to illuminate objects that have any different colour like purple or yellow will distort it because it doesn't reflect any of the three available wavelengths. That's however for using rgb as a lightbulb and not asa screen where it doesn't matter.

I wonder what they think of the intensity of a white sheet of paper by the way... (vs black or red paper).

My brain feels like it’s going to leak out of my skull watching those jokers

"There is no oxygen in air." Isn't it one of the first gaseous elements we ever discovered? Like millenia ago we knew there oxygen existed as a necessary thing to breathe, we just didn't know it was part of air itself.

I honestly think it would have been better if you showed the cone sensitivity diagram for both: - when red and green light are both seen, and - when yellow light is seen to really hammer in the point about how red light + green light can look the same as just yellow light to our eyes. Technology Connections has a pretty good video on trichromatic light vs monochromatic light and how they actually do act somewhat differently, while still being mostly the same.

I now desperately want someone to paint a red plastic toy banana with lots of tiny green dots.

These guys are the masters of ad hoc reasoning.

In fairness, the image of bananas they're looking at is rendered on an RGB display of some type, so it actually is made up of red and green. The bananas in the photo shoot were yellow.

Upon reading the title, I was expecting them to make the much more sound argument that white light produced from single wavelength RGB sources results in a very incomplete spectrum which one might struggle to call "white" in a meaningful sense. It would appear that my expectations of P&P were too great.

I will also say that true yellow or teal colored light does in fact exist, but our eyes can't tell the difference between true secondary colors and composite secondary colors. We can however see when these composite colors make florescent effects which some artificial lights do cause. I will say though in general you just won't notice the difference.

Nothing but love for you planer walk

"Black is, in OUR OPINION, more friendly to your eyes." I am so glad their opinion was stated. I feel SOOOOO much better that science is entirely upended cuz "our opinion is". ROFL

As someone who does astrophotography with a mono camera and LRGB filters, those guys gave me PTSD. But cudos to Dave for taking a bunch of idiotic ideas and make a popular scientific video aout of them. You have infinitely more patience, than I could ever muster!

Not to be the "technically..." guy, but just because I find it interesting and sometimes important as an amateur photographer: RGB can't quite make "all the colours of the rainbow," because violet light is outside the range of RGB (that is, violet is not between these colours at all and falls outside of the Blue end of the possible RGB spectrum). The most practical way to observe this shortcoming (that I know of anyway) is to take a digital photo of a sunrise or sunset that features a lot of violet. You will see in the resulting image that it looks very dull compared to the real thing, due to the missing higher frequency wavelengths that the image sensor was incapable of picking up.

Somebody should confuse Pete & Peter by mixing Red and Green paint and not get Yellow..

"Pete & Peter are stupid. Clearly you can see that the bananas ARE spinning. They're just spinning in the 4th dimension so most humans don't notice." -- A Lizard Person I like how Peter is waiting for Pete to make something up so they can agree. It gives it a good cadence with a hefty dose of Poe's Law winking at you.

WOW! Using that small LED light panel you really explained it well. By the way, (just saying) there are TVs and monitors that are RGBY adding yellow LEDs for more accurate color reproduction. And Thank You for calling them L. E. D. And not the ignoramus led. For anyone interested: They’re not Leds. LED is an acronym for Light Emitting Diode. All diodes emit light but LEDs are specifically designed for that purpose. You can still use them as a check valve (one way gate) in your circuits though. But they’re not very good as voltage limiters or Ziner diodes.