. . illuminate a room with a neon glow lamp (which will have some argon contamination). Note that you can see a wide range of color at impossibly low light levels using only two lines of the spectrum (neon (orange) and argon (violet)).

As an exercise for the student. reconcile your observations with accepted color theory in 300 words or less.

Bar neons are ionized at very high voltages, and gasses are mixed to get desired color. Tubes are sometimes tinted to modify the color further. A neon glow lamp generally runs at 115 volts and is small.

The problem with your nerves is probably that these lamps have little latency, so they flicker at 120 Cycles (Hz, for you younger guys).

I probably still have the neon glow lamp (packed in with my collection of vacuum tubes) that introduced me to the color phenomenon (back in my Jr. Scientist days (one of my several "past lives")). It's a 115 volt bulb about the size of a 15 Watt incandescent with opposing semicircles as the illumination surface. I was trying it out as a darkroom light and was amazed when I could see colors with less light than moonlight and with a single band of the spectrum, in defiance of what I'd been taught about color in school (this was neither the first nor the last episode of discovering that what you are taught in school is crap).

Further investigation came up with the facts that neon is gnerally contaminated with argon resulting in a violet sideband, the eye apparently uses ratios between the two bands to generate color, and this phenominon is not entirely unknown to science, but is rarely admintted to.