Nautilus

Color Is a Dance Between Your Brain and the World

Since our experience of color is mediated by neurobiological processes, there’s been a tendency in the philosophy of color to argue that color—rather than being a property or feature of an object—is actually an illusion.Photograph by Nick Quaranto / Flickr

hen Robbert Dijkgraaf was a little boy, growing up in the Netherlands, he’d play in his home attic after school, often with a friend. It was dark inside except for the light streaming in from one window. One time, they closed the shades so only a sliver of photons could pass through. Robbert, holding a The prism, as Newton had observed centuries before, divided the white light, , into its constituent colors. The magic of that moment inspired him to become a scientist, and now he’s the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, where many greats, like Einstein, once worked.

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