Scientists finally complete Schrödinger’s 100-year-old color theory
Key takeaways
- A century old idea from Erwin Schr dinger has taken a major step forward, thanks to new research into how humans perceive differences between colors.
- A team led by Los Alamos scientist Roxana Bujack used geometry to build a mathematical definition of color perception based on hue, saturation, and lightness.
- "What we conclude is that these color qualities don't emerge from additional external constructs such as cultural or learned experiences but reflect the intrinsic properties of the color metric itself," Bujack said.
Why this matters: new research or scientific developments with potential real-world impact.
A century old idea from Erwin Schr dinger has taken a major step forward, thanks to new research into how humans perceive differences between colors.
A team led by Los Alamos scientist Roxana Bujack used geometry to build a mathematical definition of color perception based on hue, saturation, and lightness. Their results, presented at a visualization science conference, formalize Schr dinger's model of color and show that these familiar color qualities are built into the structure of color perception itself.
"What we conclude is that these color qualities don't emerge from additional external constructs such as cultural or learned experiences but reflect the intrinsic properties of the color metric itself," Bujack said. "This metric geometrically encodes the perceived color distance -- that is, how different two colors appear to an observer."