Benjwgarner

Good question, Joshua, and good experiment to test it, quite a bright idea (sorry about the pun, it won't happen again.) Light doesn't just amplify color, color itself is light. When you see an object, light coming from the light source (in this case, the lamp) reflects off the object (the book) and enters your eyeball, where this information is sent to the brain. The white light emitted from the lamp contains all colors. The book has a pigment in it which reflects blue light and absorbs all other wavelengths. Diffferent colors are different wavelengths of light. When the lamp was dim, only a small ammount of blue light was reflecting off the book. When it was off, none was reflected. No object really "is a color", it just reflects a certain color of light. White is combination of all colors of light, while black is the lack of colors. An object that is black under white light absorbs all incoming light wavelengths. In the dark, your book, clothing, walls, and anything else is black, because no light is reflecting from it. It's not just that you can't see what color things are, they don't have a color. They do, however, retain the property of reflecting certain colors of light if a light were present (Obviously, because your book wasn't black when you turned the light back on.) When you brightened the lamp, more light was reflecting off the book and entering your eyeball, thus making the blue color brighter. The book was dimmer further away from the lamp because it was less concentrated. As light travels, it diffuses, or spreads out. Thus less of the light from the lamp hit the book further away than closer to it, because it was covering a smaller portion of the area lit by the lamp. The same thing happens with a hose. If you spray someone up close, they get very wet because they recieve all the water. If they are further away, only a few droplets hit them because the spray spreads out. Also, if you were to light the book only with a pure red light, for example, it would appear black becaue the pigment only reflects blue light. Hope this answers your question.