What is color? If I were writing for Ars, it would be an easy question to answer: photons at different energies, three different photo receptors (12 in mantis shrimp!), etc., etc. But that explanation probably requires most readers to have stayed awake during both high school biology and physics. How could you explain it to a fifth grader?
Many aspects of the world around us appear simple and are well understood scientifically. But it's often incredibly challenging to craft an explanation of these concepts that's both simple and scientifically accurate. For three years now, actor and science enthusiast Alan Alda has been challenging scientists to come up with these explanations in a contest named after its first subject: The Flame Challenge.
Alda has a long history of engaging the public's understanding of science, narrating many PBS specials, helping launch the World Science Festival, and founding an eponymous Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. (Full disclosure: I teach a short, one-credit class there each semester.) For the past three years, his Flame Challenge has called for video and text explanations of complicated subjects that are central to daily experience: flames, time, and now color.
Each year, the results have been sent out to schools, where as many as 20,000 11-year-olds have weighed in on their merits. Aside from earning the accolades of fifth graders from around the globe, the winners get a trip to New York City to take in the World Science Festival, which runs for several days in the early summer. If you feel you've got the skill to put together an approachable, compelling description of color, you have until March 1 to do so. The fifth graders are waiting.