Color Theory
...all time. Aristotle, Grimaldi, Newton, Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Young, Maxwell, Helmholtz, Hering, and Schrödinger all have been intrigued by color and have contributed to our knowledge of it.
Aristotle based his view of color on the observation that sunlight on passage through, or reflection from, an object is always reduced in intensity, or darkened. Since by this operation colors may be produced, he viewed color as a phenomenon arising out of the transition from brightness to darkness, which in a sense it is; or, stated less clearly as it usually is, Aristotle viewed color as a mixture, or blend, or commingling, or superposition, or juxtaposition of black and white. An essential part of this view, widely held up to Newton's time (1642 to 1727), is that all true and pure light, such as light from the sun, has no color, and color must be some sort of constituent or material permeating opaque and transparent objects and media, capable of altering or degrading the pure light incident upon them. Some doubts as to the correctness of Aristotle's view began to arise early in the seventeenth century because of the discovery of what
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we now name interference colors - colors of thin films, such as soap bubbles - which change markedly with angle of view. These films seem to have every kind of color in them at the same time and to contaminate the incident sunlight in different ways depending on thickness of the film and direction of passage of sunlight through it.
The discovery in 1665 by Newton that light from the sun could be bent to varying degrees by a prism so as to produce a spectrum of colors ranging from red (rays least bent), through orange, yellow, green, and blue, to violet (rays most bent) provided the basis for rejecting Aristotle's view that color comes from objects and permitted substitution for it of the view that color is a property of...
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