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What is Color? THE HISTORY AND SCIENCE OF COLOR WHAT IS COLOR? Color is defined as the aspect of things that is caused by differing qualities of light being reflected or emitted by them. To see color, you have to have light. When light shines on an object some colors bounce off the object and others are absorbed by it. Our eyes only see the colors that are bounced off or reflected. The first person to discover the link between color and light was scientist Sir Isaac Newton. THE SCIENCE OF COLOR: ISAAC NEWTON’S PRISM Pure white light, such as sunlight, is composed of the visible colors. Sir Isaac Newton discovered this in 1666 by passing a beam of light through a prism. The renowned English scientist was 23 years old at the time. He was made to stay home from Cambridge University for over a year because the plague that was sweeping Europe had closed it down. It was during this period that Newton performed his famous spectrum experiments. To alleviate the boredom of quarantine, he punched holes in the curtains of his darkened room to study the effects of light passing through a prism. The light separated into the same progression of colors found in the natural rainbow. Although he found an infinite number of colors in this spectrum, Newton wanted to show that there were just seven main colors, like the seven known planets and the seven musical notes in the diatonic scale. He identified red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. This was also in keeping with Aristotle’s seven classes of color which he thought were all mixes of black and white. Using a second prism, Newton showed that each color in the spectrum is monochromatic–that is, composed of a single, unique wavelength which can’t be further separated into other colors.