If for most mammals the world around us is black and white, then a person sees it in all the variety of colors and shades. We encounter a multicolored palette every day as we watch green foliage, blue skies, yellow sunrises and pink sunsets. The ability to distinguish one color from another is necessary for us in everyday life, for example, to cross the road at a traffic light, or not to confuse a hot water tap with a cold one.
A Brief History of Color Theory
For the first time, the theory of colors was described by the ancient Greeks, who managed to understand their main essence - being in the interval between light and darkness. In ancient Greece, the main colors were considered not 7 (as today), but only 4 - corresponding to the elements: fire, water, air and earth. Darkness was already considered by the Greeks not as a color, but as its complete absence, which is fully consistent with modern theory.
Isaac Newton decomposed light into 7 colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) in 1704. He was the first to draw an analogy between the light flux and the sound octave, and determined that the first color in the spectrum refers to the last (in intensity) in a ratio of 1:2.
In 1810, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his book The Theory of Color (Zur Farbenlehre) depicted a color circle of three primary colors - red, blue and yellow, at the intersection of which there were three additional ones - orange, green and purple. It was Goethe who first put forward the theory that with a certain mixture, any shade can be created from the three main ones - red, yellow and blue.
Research on the light spectrum continued, and in 1839 Michel Eugene Chevreul created a color hemisphere with an afterimage effect. It lies in the fact that if you look at the green part of the palette for a long time, and then look at the white part, it will subjectively appear reddish. This is due to the fatigue of the eye receptors that capture the green part of the spectrum.
The modern HSV color model, used on all digital displays, appeared at the beginning of the 20th century thanks to the artist Albert Henry Munsell. Then it was presented in the form of a "Munsell tree", where the definition of colors and shades depended on spatial coordinates (the axes of brightness and saturation).
Interesting facts
- Statistically, the world's favorite color is blue. It is liked by 40% of people, and, according to scientists, helps to calm the nervous system.
- Furniture and decoration in catering establishments most often has a yellow and orange color. These colors, when properly lit, not only make food more appetizing, but also promote the production of gastric juice.
- Pink tones have the most beneficial effect on the human psyche. They calm the nerves, reduce the level of aggression and stress. Therefore, pink is often used in the interior decoration of correctional institutions, orphanages, schools, and other social facilities.
- The most unpleasant shade for the human eye is Pantone 448 C (according to the international classification), also known as "the ugliest color in the world." Visually, it looks like a mixture of excrement and swamp slurry, and evokes the most unpleasant associations. This feature is actively used in Australia, coloring cigarette packages in Pantone 448 C shade, which has already led to a noticeable decrease in demand for tobacco products.
- In retirement, Emerson Moser, Crayola's chief wax crayon molder, admitted after 37 years that he was colorblind and unable to distinguish colors.
- The human eye can distinguish many shades of green, and it is this color that is used in all night vision devices.
- Actually, the sun's rays are pure white. The atmosphere of the Earth, which refracts the light flux, makes them yellow.
- Yellow markers are the most common, as they do not create shadows when photocopying.
Summing up, it is worth noting that according to Planck's quantum theory, light is a stream of indivisible portions of energy: quanta and photons. In 1900, this theory became revolutionary for science, but today corpuscular-wave dualism is additionally added to it. That is, light can be not only a stream of elementary quantum particles, but also a wave with electromagnetic properties.
It is the length of light electromagnetic waves that determines what color we see: from purple (400 millimicrons) to red (700 millimicrons). The human eye can only distinguish colors in this range - from 400 to 700 microns. It is noteworthy that objects / objects themselves do not have any color, and this feeling is subjective. So, if we see a red rose, it only means that its molecular structure absorbs all light electromagnetic waves except for the red spectrum, which is reflected from it and captured by our vision.
