One interesting topic presented in this chapter is a colourful debate between Newton and Goethe about the nature of colour. Goethe’s ideas about colour opposed Newton’s in that Newton thought of colour as a static quantity that could be measured in a spectrometer.Goethe argued that colour was a matter of perception. Newton’s experiment using a prism broughthim to his theory. Through his experiment, he witnessed how a prism breaks a beam of white light into rainbow colour, andconcluded that these
were the components that add up to produce white. He also proposed that these colours corresponded to frequencies. In Goethe’s experiment, he held a prism to his eye and looked through it. He sawno colour at all. Heobserved the same results when looking at a white surface, as he did when looking at a blue sky. He saw uniformity. However, Goethe did witness
spots on his white surface or blue sky that he concluded to be “the interchange of light and shadow” that causes colour. He then went on to explore the ways people perceive shadows cast by different sources of coloured light. One way in which Goethe and Newton differed was that Newton broke light apart and found physical explanations for colour, while Goethe studying paintings and nature looking for holistic explanations of colour. In a sense, I believe that Goethe’s theories were worth more attention than they actually received. Newton’s theory was very much legitimate, but should not be used alone in defining the nature of light. The colours we perceive vary from time to time, and person to person. The scientific theory doesn’t completely describe the real life brightness of colour, which we see, although it did explain the components of the colours we see. Does that mean that there can be a happy medium between the scientific theory and the philosophical idea?
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