The UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has sponsored a new exhibition on Info Island II called Aspects of Appearance.

There are several exhibits about appearance, particularly color, and how NPL has been involved in the science of appearance over the years. One exhibit lets you click on buttons corresponding to different kinds of color blindness (like protanopia), and see what it means for the three different kinds of cone cells in the retina. For example, if you click the protanopia button, the “red” cone bursts into flames and burns to a blackened twig (because people with protanopia have no red cones). It also tells you that “Protanopia is when the ‘red’ cones are missing. This makes it difficult to distinguish reds, greens, and yellows. Protanopia occurs in 1.3% of men and 0.02% of women.”

There is also a room, called the Protanopia Room, which looks quite ordinary and is decorated in reds and greens. But it’s no ordinary room… If you click the candles, all the textures on everything in the room suddenly change to those that someone with Protanopia would see!

The exhibition has some other neat exhibits too. Did you know that NPL has a tree that can be traced to Isacc Newton’s apple tree (the one from which an apple fell, causing him to ponder the force that made it fall and its relation to the force holding the Moon in orbit about the Earth)?

Check it out on Info Island II.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 6:57 pm and is filed under General, Science Center. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.