Last week, I popped back to leafy Surrey to do a bit of filming. It gave me the opportunity to pop round to my Dad’s house for a cup of tea and a catch up. When rummaging through my old room for things I might want to take back to London, I came across this book…
It’s a short book of simple experiments to show different aspects of colour, from why we see multiple colours in a rainbow to how many everyday colours are made up from mixing a more limited palate. I remember devouring this book – making my Mum help me do all the experiments. It was heaven for a little geek like me!
I can’t imagine a life without colour. Would either of these scenes be so awe-inspiring, so spectacular, without it?
Perceiving colour is not straightforward though. For one thing, context is important. Beau Lotto shows this, and other aspects of visual perception, in a TED talk from 2009:
While you ponder on that, I’m off to re-live my childhood. I’m attempting the experiment I could never make work as a child…
