What exactly is color? It can be argued that it is only a human illusion, but it is most accurate to say that color is a human visual perceptual characteristic. Namely, thanks to the receptors in the retina of the eye, man is able to see a part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Exactly 200 years ago, the famous German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) published the book Theory of Colors (Zur Farbenlehre) in which some of the first coherent explanations of what colors actually are were given. Apparently, it is an extremely unusual detail that a poet like Goethe in 1810 was engaged in the scientific research of colors, but this work of Goethe’s approach enabled, in addition to the research of the optical spectrum, as it was studied by physicists, to open up the field of investigation of the phenomenon of human color perception. This gave rise to today’s color theory, which explains the mixing of colors and the visual effect of certain color combinations for the needs of the visual and fine arts.
Goethe became interested in the phenomenon of color after looking at a refraction of light through a prism and its “splitting” into the colors of the rainbow. Realizing that the science of the time did not have very clear answers about the origin and perception of color, he faced this topic and examined some of the phenomena. Goethe’s Color Theory was not an axiomatically structured work, but rather an overview of what could be discerned about the phenomenon of color – even at the time it was published, Goethe’s book did not have any special scientific significance, but it was inspirational for artists and philosophers in the 19th century.
Logically, in his analyses, Goethe relied on the fundamental theory already given by Isaac Newton (1643–1727) in the book Optics from 1704, which is considered a pioneering work on the nature of light and the first scientific explanation of how colors are created. With his famous experiment with the refraction of light through a prism, Newton explained how color is actually a property of light itself and that it is not simply a characteristic of an object.
But Goethe rightly saw that Newton’s explanation of how light “consists” of only seven colors in the spectrum that combine was not entirely complete and, less frequently mentioned, he rejected Newton’s theory of light being made up of particles, but he did not favor nor to the rival Huygens school that light is a wave. Goethe’s claim that it is neither a wave nor a particle fits remarkably well with the modern quantum mechanical explanation of the behavior of light. Goethe also drew a wheel with six colors, and at the end of the 19th century, German scientists developed the so-called RGB system in more detail with three basic colors: red, green and blue.
But what exactly is color? It can be argued that it is only a human illusion, but it is most accurate to say that color is a human visual perceptual characteristic. Namely, thanks to the receptors in the retina of the eye, a person is able to see a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, namely that which has wavelengths between 380 and 780 nanometers, which is most often called the visible spectrum (light or radiation with a longer or shorter wavelength belongs to radio waves , microwaves, infrared radiation, X radiation or gamma radiation).
Each monochromatic radiation originating from a light source has a specific wavelength, which can be, for example, 570 nanometers. We see this radiation in the human eye as light of a specific color, which in our case is yellow. However, the Sun’s or white light is not monochromatic and consists of a “mixture” of several monochromatic lights, which is clearly verified in experiments such as the one in which Newton separated white light into seven colors by refraction, and can also be found in nature in phenomena such as the formation long. In a simplified way, it can be said that certain wavelengths of visible light are in fact its color, but one should be careful with this explanation because other beings do not have to see light of the same wavelength in the same way, in the same color as a human.
It should be emphasized that objects and the world around us do not actually have their “own colors”. When light falls on a certain object or material, some parts of the light spectrum are well absorbed and some are reflected, which in itself is a true characteristic of the material. When an object is observed, only those parts of the spectrum, i.e. those “colors” that are rejected, reach the eye, which creates the illusion in the eye and brain that the object has that color.
But the bottom line is that the colored image of an object that we see, no matter how luxurious, exciting or depressing it may be, was not actually created by the object, but by the light that “carries” all possible colors within itself. There is no color in total darkness.
The most interesting thesis is that it is not at all necessary that the light of the same color is seen by every human being as the same color in their brain. What if person A perceives 570 nm light as blue and person B perceives it as red? This is not a problem in communication since we all call it yellow in everyday language. But this question shows better than anything else that the world does not have to be equal in the perception of two people.
Think about him. Turn off the light and try to touch all those objects around you in complete darkness, your body, fabrics, armchairs, tables and walls, all those constructions made of billions of tightly bound molecules with no color on them. All that dead colorless world. You will almost certainly want to turn the light back on. And to revive the colors again, even if they are only our illusions.
News and Science 
Leave a comment