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  "path": "/2026/02/19/traversal-blue/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-19T23:43:57.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.themarginalian.org",
  "tags": [
    "art",
    "culture",
    "science",
    "books",
    "Carl Sagan",
    "Humphry Davy",
    "Traversal",
    "read article"
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  "textContent": "This essay is adapted from Traversal. We look at a thing — a bird, a ball, a planet — and perceive it to be a certain color. But what we are really seeing is the color that does not inhere in it—the portion of the spectrum it shirks, the wavelength of light it reflects back unabsorbed. Our world appears a swirling miracle of blue, but its blueness is only a perceptual phenomenon arising from how our particular atmosphere, with its particular chemistry and its insentient stubbornness toward a particular portion of the spectrum, absorbs and reflects light. In the living… read article",
  "title": "The Color of Wonder and the Chemical Code of Creation"
}