The Shape of Colour

Some things don't have shape, they are abstract, like COLOUR / COLOR

In our attempts to understand colour we have given it a shape,
There are 7 shapes shown in this montage.

1 Isaac Newton (1643-1727) experimented with colour DISKS, discovering that by spinning a disk with the colours of the rainbow, results in white.

2. In the 19th century James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), continuing the experiments, concluded that white could be made from just 3 colours, using LIGHTS with gel filters. This work, the basis of all computer screens today, went hand in hand with his mathematical work that predicted light was just one part of an electromagnetic spectrum, but he couldn't prove it.

3. Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) confirmed this work by experiment after James Clerk Maxwell's death, and the LINEAR SCALE of the Electromagnetic Spectrum bears his name, Hertz.

4. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) also introduced the WHEEL, where the colours are not a linear frequency scale, but a continuous circle, used to this day in understanding colours and their harmonious relationships.

5. In an effort to quantify colour the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) in 1931 produced the Chromaticity Diagram in an attempt to remove the subjective nature of measurements.

6. Although Colour Television was demonstrated in the 1920s by John Logie Baird (1888-1946) commercial systems were introduced in the 1950s, first by the American National Television Standards Council (NTSC). Using the work of those who went before to fit all the colour information into the same space as allocated by the existing monochrome systems, they used Quadrature Modulation, where colour is defined by PHASE and the detail transmitted is tailored to the subjective human eye.

0. And all the time we are viewing these colour shapes inside a colour CUBE, a space where the colour constantly changes, and there are no discontinuities. At the 8 vertices are White and Black, primary colours: Red, Green and Blue, with secondary colours Yellow, Magenta and Cyan.

BUT TO THIS DAY YOU CAN'T TELL ANYONE THE SHAPE OF COLOUR

Artistica / Panoramic Paintings

GPS location unavailable (not recorded, no physical location depicted or intentionally suppressed)

Precision is: Suppressed. Will not show on map.

PaintshopPro for colour gradient generation,
PTGui for composition and equirectangular projection,
PaintshopPro for generation of insets and post processing.

Never heard of James Clerk Maxwell? The most influential physicist and mathematician of the 19th Century.

1. He mathematically predicted that Saturn's rings were made of dust, not gas, liquid or a solid plate. Vogager 2 proved this beyond doubt in 1981.

2. He derived the formulae used to calculate the strength of roof trusses, maximum strength minimum cost in their triangle shapes, used to this day.

3. His work on colour led to the first colour reproduction, a tartan ribbon taken with three cameras with coloured gels then projected back with magic lanterns through the same gels.to recombine the 3 colours.

4. ALL colour screens we use today use this technique, & this work led to him declaring mathematically that there was an electromagnetic spectrum, which we rely on so much today, where the waves of differing frequencies all travel at the speed of light.

Visit the virtual tour of his home https://clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/india-street/housetour.html in |Edinburgh, Scotland.