Lecture 1
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The document discusses the topic of color physics and measurement. It notes that color is important for identifying and re-identifying objects, but that there is ongoing disagreement about whether color is an objective physical property of objects or a subjective perception that depends on the observer. The major problem in understanding color comes from reconciling what we experience about the colors of objects with what physics tells us about the physical qualities of bodies.
Lecture 1
- 1. COLOUR PHYSICS AND MEASUREMENT (TE 509) LECTURE 1
- 2. • Colors are important in both identifying objects, i.e., in locating them in space, and in re- identifying them • Much is known about human color vision both subjectively and quantitatively from the fields of physics, psychology and physiology • Despite much thought, by philosophers and scientists, we seem little closer now to an agreed account of color than we ever were ! ! !
- 3. • The disagreement: • Some theorists believe colors to be perceiver- relative, e.g., dispositions or powers to induce experiences of a certain kind, or to appear in certain ways to observers of a certain kind • Others take them to be objective, physical properties of objects • The major problem with color has to do with fitting what we seem to know about colors into what science, particularly physics, tells us about physical bodies and their qualities
- 4. • we experience color as an intrinsic feature of the surfaces of physical bodies, or as a property spread throughout a volume, e.g., Apple Juice • It is this problem that historically has led the major physicists who have thought about color, to hold a common view: that the colors we ordinarily and naturally take objects to possess, are such that physical objects do not actually have them
- 5. • COLOUR is a sensory perception produced in brain. • It requires: • A Light Source • An Object • An Observer