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Dinesh club

Posted: 05 Apr 2017

Taken: 05 Apr 2017

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Spring •
Michigan •
2017 •
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'CHAOS' •
James Gelick •
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Morning colours

Morning colours
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The touchstone of Newton’s theory was his famous experiment with prism. A prism breaks a beam of white light into a rainbow of colors, spread across the whole visible spectrum, and Newton realized that those pure colors must be the elementary components that add to produce white. Further, with a leap of insight, he proposed that the colors corresponded to frequencies. He imagined that some vibrating bodies – corpuscles was the antique word – must be producing colors in proportion to the speed of the vibrations. Considering how little evidence supported this notion, it was as unjustifiable as it was brilliant. What is red? To a physicist, it is light radiating in waves between 620 to 800 billionth of a meter long. Newton’s optics proved themselves a thousand times over, while Goethe’s treatise on color faded into merciful obscurity. When Feigenbaum went looking for it, he discovered that the one copy in Harvard’s libraries had been removed.

He finally did track down a copy, and he found that Goethe had actually performed an extraordinary set of experiments in his investigation of colors. Goethe began as Newton had, with a prism. Newton had held a prism before a light, casting the divided beam onto a white surface. Goethe held the prism to his eye and looked through it. He perceived no color at all, neither a rainbow nor individual hues. Looking at a closer white surface on a cereal blue sky through the prism produced the same effect: uniformity

But if a slight spot interrupted th white surface o a cloud appeared in the sky, then he would burst of colour. It is “the interchange of light and shadow,” Goethe concluded, that causes color. He went on to explore the way people perceive shadows cast by different sources of colored light. He used candles and pencils, mirrors and colored glass, moonlight and sunlight, crystals, liquids and color wheels before a piece of white paper at twilight and held up a pencil. The shadow of the candlelight was a brilliant blue. Why? The white paper alone is perceived as white, either in the declining daylight or in the added light on the warmer candle. How does a shadow divide the white into a region of blue and a region of reddish-yellow? Color is “a degree of darkness, Goethe argued, “allied to shadow” Above all, in a more modern language, color comes from boundary conditions and singularities.

While Newton was reductionist, Goethe was holistic. Newton broke light apart and found the most basic physical explanation for color. Goethe walked through flower gardens and studied paintings, looking for a grand, all-encompassing explanation. Newton made his theory of color fit a mathematical scheme for all of physics, Goethe, fortunately or unfortunately, abhorred mathematics.

Feigenbaum persuaded himself that Goethe had been right about color. Goethe’s ideas resemble a facile notion, popular among psychologists, that makes a distinction between hard physical reality and the variable subjective perceptions of it. The colors we perceive vary from time to time and from person to person – that much is easy to say. But as Feigenbaum understood them, Goethe’s ideas had more true science in them. They were hard and empirical. Over and over again, Goethe emphasized the repeatability of his experiments. It was the perception of color, to Goethe, that was universal and objective. What scientific evidence was there for a definable real-world quality of redness independent of our perception?

Feigenbaum found himself asking what sort of mathematical formalism might correspond to human perception, particularly a perception that sifted the messy multiplicity of experience and found universal qualities. Redness is not necessarily a particular bandwidth of light, as the Newtonians would have it. It is a territory of a chaotic universe, and the boundaries of the territory are not so easy to describe – yet our minds find redness with regular and variable consistency. These were the thoughts of a young physicist, far removed, it seemed, from such problems as fluid turbulence. Still to understand how the human mind sorts through the chaos of perception, surely one would need to understand how disorder can produce universality ~ Page 165/166
8 weeks ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
CHAOS
8 weeks ago.

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