"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who know it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle."

Albert Einstein

The Mysterious

In the ancient cultures of Greece, Egypt, China, and India, color was used for physical healing. The Egyptians built temples where they bathed a patient in specific colors of light to produce different effects. Today we know that a blindfolded person will experience physiological reactions under different colored rays of light. The power of color goes beyond what we see.

Neuropsychologist Kurt Goldstein notes these powers of color In his modern classic The Organism. In it he states that stimulation of the skin by different colors leads to different effects.

I believe that in the study of color we must connect the physical, physiological, philosophical, and metaphysical properties of it to begin to understand its impact on our lives. In doing so we will see that with each answer a new question arises. This is not my quest for the ultimate answer, but rather a realization that my palette holds more than just paint.

The Physical

Sir Isaac Newton discovered that light could be split into colors using a prism. Light is electromagnetic waves. These waves are measured in nanometers (nm) with one nm equaling one billionth of a meter. Visible lightwaves in the form of color have a wavelength about the size of the diameter of a human hair, or between 400 and 700 nm. Red has the longest wavelength and violet has the shortest. The color of an object is actually determined by what rays it is reflecting. If an object is black then it is not reflecting any, a white object is reflecting them all, a blue object is reflecting the blue rays, etc.

The light waves that are invisible to the eye are on either side of the spectrum, with UV and X rays being shorter than 400nm and infrared and radio waves being longer than 700nm.

Light is not only made up of waves, but also of particles. Physicist Max Planck came up with the idea of quantum light, that is the energy of light being "granularised". This "grain" of energy is called a photon. Science was changed with the introduction of this new partical without mass.

The Physiological

Color also appears to have an effect on plant growth. In a study done by photobiologist Dr. John Ott, plants were grown under light filtered through different colors of glass. The plants grown under red shot up quickly but ended up stunted, the ones grown under green did not fair well at all, the ones grown under blue had slower initial growth, but did the best in the long run, producing lush leaves and strong tall stalks.

What colors we surround ourselves with can be as important to our health as what kind of air we breath or food we eat.

The Philosophical

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras thought of color being assigned to musical notes, this may have happened after his travels in the East, where the idea was widespread. Aristotle thought of color being associated with certain areas of the body. In the early 13th century the first chancellor of Oxford University, Robert Grosseteste, developed a color system for his work A Grandiose Metaphysical Interpretation of Light. Color and Light have for good reason been the subject of many a philosopher's thoughts throughout time and cultures.

The Metaphysical

The term metaphysics originally referred to the writings of Aristotle. It was to mean a branch of philosophy that attempts to understand the fundamental nature of all reality, whether visible or invisible. It seeks a description so basic, so essentially simple and all-inclusive that it applies to everything.

Certainly the study of color and light needs to be looked at with a metaphysical view. When we realize how intertwined it is with our existence then we know that there is still much about it that is unseen. I think that in studying anything one must appreciate the importance of the unknown and its possibilities.