Dust off your science and video skills for Alan Alda’s Flame Challenge

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.