So I'm doing some research into infrared light. I'm wondering how infrared 'sight' would appear, but not the thermal sort. What I mean is, in instances where there is insufficient visible light, what would someone who miraculously is blessed with infrared sight 'see'? (They would have eyes capable of detecting wavelengths below 380nm (the usual seeming lower boundary for visible light / human eye capacity)) Would the overriding colour be a bright purple-white? Again I'm not asking about thermography however. Or am I just talking nonsense?
Likely it would be black and white. Night vision googles are essentially infrared (and they aren't green usually). The black and white "rods" of the eye are responsible for night vision and it's very likely that something that can easily see in the dark would see in these colors (though technically black and white aren't really colors). They could see in the colors below red but I doubt any human will ever be able to tell you what that looks like: However to see these colors you will still need sufficient visible light so you might not have that based on how far you take it. Purple would be impossible as it's a high frequency color that won't come out easily at night at all. You need lots of light to get blue and violet to come out at all. Like I said though. For infrared you might want to go with black and white. Those are the colors of the limited human night vision and a wide range of other animals who are very active at night.
How it is perceived depends on the brain's "wiring". You could see it as any color you can imagine, or possibly even as a color distinct from every color you currently perceive. How do you describe a sunrise to someone who has been totally color-blind from birth? You cannot separate infrared vision from thermography, though. The temperature variations among surfaces is what you will see in the infrared band, perhaps modified by materials you are looking through (in the same way that looking through a piece of blue glass alters your perception of normal colors).
You would see a red more red than red. Heat would cause a super ruddiness. I don’t know, “seeing heat” is probably the best way to go, but there is probably some interesting language you could use.
