Full Color

This book will roughly follow the back-and-forth of color between—to be reductionist about it—physics and mind. People make colored things, and material that confers color. That’s pigments, dyes, paints, cosmetics, whatever. Then they learn about how colors work, their physics and chemistry and neuroscience. Then, with all that knowledge, people make more colors. The wavelength changes, but the oscillation stays the same.

Earth Tones

Along with white made from chalk or calcium carbonate, and black derived from charcoal or manganese dioxide, the ochres were the foundational palette of human art.

Rainbow

• One if the main reasons the East India Company was founded was to trade for dye from indigo (which we are growing!)
• 1400s → progress in how to depict folded and draped fabrics in paintings— bright and lighter colors for parts closer and vice versa (but it took some time to figure this out, and eventually required new and more refractive paints)

The Lead White of Commerce

• Lead white → “technology of color for centuries” (in cosmetics, paints)
• Danger of lead known since time of Romans
• Shift to zinc-based white in 1700s

Titanium White

• Big deal when titanium dioxide “discovered” as a great white pigment, started wave of a bunch of other synthetic pigments
• But… found that TiO2 actually used by Incans way long ago!

Color Words

• Classic question: “Do people who call colors by different names literally see different colors?”
  • No, people can see colors they don’t have words for
• Languages acquire words for new colors in the same order
• Weirdness with color words for green/blue, where most of variation actually is
• What about when not confined to just one word? Studies with babies? Very confusing and inconclusive
• Objects systematically biased for warm colors (from looking at images from AI training sets)

The spectrum is continuous. But our understanding of the spectrum is not.

Fake Colors and Color Fakes

• Difference btw idea of colors and technology of colors