Ian Lawson on "What Was Color?"
Monday, May 7, 2018 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4Bard College Berlin Cafeteria
On Monday, May 7, 2018 faculty member Ian Lawson will give a presentation titled "What Was Color?" in the frame of the Faculty Colloquium Series.
What does it mean to understand color? Routine distinctions like primary and secondary, hue and value, and even warm and cold are relatively recent conventions. Accounts other than our own often sound quaint or just obviously wrong to our ears. In his talk, Lawson will sketch various historical accounts of color and roughly trace the development of red, yellow and blue as primary colors. He will end in the middle of the seventeenth century with a classic scientific controversy between Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke, whose very different ideas about this raise the question of what it means to scientifically investigate color.
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