Talk:2734: Electron Color

Electrons have no color?! BUt lIgHTnIng strIKeS aRe YEllOw, aND LigHTNing IS MaDe uP of eLECTrOns.172.71.254.115 22:43, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Actually most colors are emitted by electrons orbiting atoms after absorbing light. The color electrons emit depend on their kinetic energy and available places they can travel, a tiny bit similar to how things change color as they get hotter, but more extreme and general. 172.70.114.198

It may refer to the Greek etymology of the word "electron". Originally it meant amber, a yellow gem. 172.68.118.146 23:20, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

I can't do formatting, I'm new. Sorry! -- No Idea If There's A Character Limit LMAO (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

To me, this is 1000% building on the idea of debating the colors of school subjects. I've added a bit of explanation to the text about it. I used my own color associations & reasons (science = green, history = red) as an example, and I'm sure people will disagree with me. Leave your color/subject associations in a reply to this comment, could be a fun little debate! (also, English = blue) Zman350x (talk) 23:50, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

SocStud is yellow, Math is red, Science is green?, ELA is gray, French is blue, and orange is my least favorite subject out of the rest. I have gotten into many arguments with my friends.

172.70.230.157 00:10, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Science = Green (green flask bubbling)

Social Studies = Blue (blue and green globe, green is taking)

Math = Red (math is reliable, red is a strong color so i associate it with reliability)

English = Yellow (all other colors are taken)

Also electrons are blue

Iffy (talk) 23:53, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Hm! I've never heard of school subjects having any assigned colors; much less any debate about it! If we're identifying them by the folders they're kept in, my favorite subject was Ferrari & my least favorite was Porsche.

ProphetZarquon (talk) 04:41, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I don't recall colour-coded (UK) schoolbooks, in particular (except the "red pirate, green pirate, blue pirate, etc" stories for young kids, the red pirate like only rubies, the green one emeralds, the blue probably sapphires, and had clothing/etc that matched, naturally), but I had (have still, somewhere!) a collection of Usborne Encyclopaedias at home with a veritable rainbow of colours. Mathematics was yellow, I think, Computers a shade of blue, one of the Red or off-Red (slightly pinker, but still deep red) might have been Physics (had geophysics in it, IIRC), I think History was a light-green. I'm sure I never had the whole set, but I had enough to arrange in as close to Richard Of York order as I felt most content to do, when on the bookshelf.

Obviously there were colours involved with the school stuff. I'm sure different levels of SPMG (Scottish Primary Maths Group?) workbooks were colour-coded, perhaps more for the benefit of the teacher, though the later SMP ones were probably more just identified as "13a", "5b", etc, to work through various sub-subjects and the increasingly advanced techniques thereof, perhaps coloured with highlights only to not be boring black-on-white monochrome covers.

And there's so many other colour-classifications that I instituted for myself, over the years, showing just how useful a hue can be to represent and differentiate a class of something, such as various 3M-style "post-it"-like arrow stickers stuck into the pages of a book for quick reference to all instances of one particular thing or another. For which I suppose I'm grateful to not having any notable form of colour-blindness, to limit my options. 172.70.91.114 08:20, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

This is completely BS. This is about the diagrams used for drawing atoms where colors are used for different elementary particles. And Randall clearly explains that they do not have real color. And the jokes that people still have feelings for what colors are chosen based on the conventions used where people first learned about atoms. Have removed the color on subjects completely as it has nothing to do with this comic. --Kynde (talk) 09:43, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

PS you cannot be more than 100% on anything :-D --Kynde (talk) 09:46, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I believe this comic was made in response to a book talk Randall did in Seattle, where this question was actually asked to him in person! If you want to hear it yourself, someone recorded the talk here: https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/xjuc4i/a_recording_and_autotranscript_of_randalls_latest/ 172.71.142.6 00:45, 7 February 2023 (UTC) A random new user

Was it the dorky randall with red hair or the photogenic one with brown hair and blue eyes or am I going wildly mad? 172.70.114.198 00:51, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Am I crazy, I always thought of electrons as blue to contrast with the protons which are red172.70.211.89 04:47, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

You're all crazy! Elections are 2817.9am & protons are 1.5am. "Yellow" is over 557,000,000,000am! Maybe you've all got your displays' color gamut set too low?  ;S

ProphetZarquon (talk) 09:18, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I have also seen protons as red and neutons as white and electron as blue in the diagrams I remember. Never yellow electrons. --Kynde (talk) 09:43, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

"This comic appears to "elevate" that discussion to the college level." - considering that the students are considerably smaller than the teacher (notice the heads), I seriously doubt this is meant to be set in a college classroom - high school at most, IMHO. Also, "One common debate among schoolchildren is over the "color" of various subjects. Because of the brightly colored folders commonly used to separate subjects in the binder of a young student, the students tend to associate those colors with the subject." - well, not in any school I ever attended, nor with any school class I've ever worked with. I'd be inclined to dispute that this is at all common. 172.70.46.85

I agree that this is probably not supposed to be college-level, but the color-subject coordination is definitely real (albeit not a very common topic of debate). 162.158.90.38 08:01, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I find it hard to believe Randall is referencing colors of school subjects without alluding to them in any way; to the contrary, I feel fairly certain he's directly referencing the various colors assigned to electrons, protons, quarks, etc, in diagrammatic illustrations of atomic structure. I think the whole first paragraph is way off base (though interesting tangentially).

ProphetZarquon (talk) 09:18, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I agree with all above here and have corrected the explanation to school class and pupils and diagram colors removing school subject color completely! --Kynde (talk) 09:43, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Was it also worth removing the synesthesia bit? Entirely unrelated to school-subject organisation-by-colour that I also think was an incarnadine clupea harengus, but very possibly relevent to "but I happen think it's obvious that <concept> is a <hue> thing!"... For consideration, or as a side-note, whether or not you restore that possible reference. 172.71.242.203 10:42, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Electrons are blue, right? In all my textbooks (Germany) electrons are blue. Is this a generally accepted addition? 198.41.242.166 07:13, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I stopped the explanation saying that electrons were (by implication, solely) yellow. If green is used for a nucleon (neutron? red being proton?), they might choose blue for an electron, as contrast. Or black dot or white (black-outlined) small circle to contrast with whatever the nucleons are with their much bigger circles clumped in the middle.

But, given other regular colour-conventions, I could imagine yellow as a popular 'electron' colour. Either in its own right (influencing the choices given to the other things depicted) or as the main obviously remaining option (the other things having been decided upon first). Horses for courses. And I can imagine cultural/national differences (e.g. what colours your household wiring was set up as, at least before EU standardisation but then red and black still exists in the mindset, despite blue and brown, or whatever it might have been) if not localised 'linguistic puns' to make some choices more 'obvious' than others. 172.70.91.114 08:20, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, yellow is sometimes indicative of electrical hazard, as opposed to red for flame... So many ways to draw associations!

ProphetZarquon (talk) 09:18, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes blue electrons, red protons and white neutrons are probably common on Europe, it is in Denmark. I'm a physicist and word with radioactive isotopes and teach about them. My drawings are red protons and white neutrons and blue electrons. --Kynde (talk) 09:43, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I don’t know what Ms. Lenhart is talking about. Electrons are blue, protons are red, and neutrons are definitely grey. Not sure how to sign my comment tho. Oh well 172.70.174.115 (talk) 13:00, 7 February 2023 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

(You sign your comments with a string of ~~~~ (as suggested by the comment at the top of many a comic-discussion page, when you start to edit it)... or you wait for someone else to do what I just did for you, but that's more effort than the four tildes on your part.)

For what it's worth, I'm mostly with you. Red and grey/dark-grey/black in the centre, as you say. Light blue (or yer actual electric blue?) or (bluish?) white electrons. Depends what colour-pallettes are available to the illustrator/modeller, I imagine, and what else needs a distinct colour alongside the basic trio (e.g. yellow fission/fusion "sparky-flame energy things" or general labelling stuff). 162.158.158.246 13:15, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I did some data collection on image searches for atom diagrams, and yes, the defacto color standard is protons red, neutrons grey (less commonly yellow or green), and electrons blue.

I like this because it gives opposing colors to the opposing positive and negative charges, (the same color choices as the traditional magnet north and south ends, likely not coincidentally,) and a neutral color to the uncharged neutron. Which makes me think that when Lenhart says "electrons are yellow" she does not mean in the diagram sense, but rather in the sense "if you make an electron big enough to see, it is yellow". SomeDee (talk) 16:58, 7 February 2023 (UTC)