
Goethe's Theory of Colors - evolve2k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe%27s_Theory
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pepijndevos
"Newton's error.. was trusting math over the sensations of his eye."

A trait very common amongst scientists. I tried to explain to my peers that
you could see blue as lightened darkness and yellow and red as darkened light.

This makes a lot of sense perceptually, if you look at the sky and the sun as
it transitions from night to day.

But all they had to say was newton and wavelengths and prisms. That stuff is
all fine, but it does't talk about how we perceive colour.

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samuell
This "lightening" and "darkening" you describe actually makes a lot of sense
in terms of another way of connecting phycis and color, if we by "lightened"
mean "higher color temperature", and for "darkened" "lower color temperature".

(Color temperature according to Wikipedia is "temperature of an ideal black-
body radiator that radiates light of comparable hue to that of the light
source")

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature)

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Aardwolf
Seems like he did at least one thing right: not mention indigo, unlike newton
who used this not-even-tertiary color as a 7th color rather than e.g. put cyan
between green and blue (ROYGCBV would have made more sense than ROYGBIV,
color-wise)

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aaimnr
I remember an article about a study in which some psychologists tried to
estimate the IQ of the most important scholars, writers and scientist of all
time.

As far a I remember Goethe had the second highest score, right after Leibniz.

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Someone
German psychologists, I assume, or "of the most important _German_ scholars"?

Newton or Archimedes vs Leibniz? I wouldn't dare make that call.

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evolve2k
> "As Feigenbaum understood them, Goethe's ideas had 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 colour, to
> Goethe, that was universal and objective. What scientific evidence was there
> for a definable real-world quality of redness independent of our
> perception?"

In light of the recent scientific crisis it's interesting to look Gothe's work
with new eyes.

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mitchtbaum
It seems like we have many crises underway. Why focus on one as if it has a
different source and meaning than another?

