1 - The Origins of Modern Color Science

Abstract

This chapter discusses the origins of modern colors of science. For the history of color science is as much the history of misconception and insight as it is of experimental refinement. The errors that have held back the fields have most often been category errors, that is, errors with regard to the domain of knowledge within which a given observation is to be explained. For over a century the results of mixing colored lights were explained in terms of physics rather than in terms of the properties of human photoreceptors. Modern color science finds its birth in the seventeenth century. Before that time, it was commonly thought that white light represented light in its pure form and that colors were modifications of white light. It was already well known that passing white light through triangular glass prisms could produce colors, and the long thin prisms sold at fairs had knobs on the end so that they could be suspended close to a source of light.