Does Colour Exist? A talk by Professor Stephen Westland

‘The rays are not coloured,’ wrote Isaac Newton in 1666. He was claiming that light in the visible spectrum is not actually coloured; it just looks coloured. This idea stretches back much further than the seventeenth century to ancient thinking and Democritus.

Yet it certainly seems that colour is a property of the world. It feels as though objects in the world really are coloured.

This lecture will explore our modern understanding of colour and present many visual examples, including those that are often referred to as illusions. Are we any closer to understanding the nature of colour and can we finally answer the question of whether colour exists?

Stephen Westland, Professor of Colour Science at the University of Leeds, teaches and researches on many aspects of colour including colour ontology, colour design, colour imaging and the use of colour in textiles, automotive industry, cosmetics and dentistry. He’s published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and several text books and is currently a member of the Colour Literacy Project.

[franzoking]

The temporal contrast seems to indicate color is a perception and the result of how we processed the world. I wasn't looking at the cross, and I didn't see green. I missed the instructions. I backed it up, and then I saw green. Same video, same person, same light frequency, different results.