I) What is color?

“What do you want with this stupid and useless question”, you may say, “every child in Kindergarten knows what color is”. That`s right, but if we think about them, many things that seemed to be simple before, start to become complicated, the more we think about them. Ask yourself: “Can I see light? What makes colors? If the light consists of the rainbow colors, then why are not all things colored like a rainbow at daylight? Have things colors by themselves? Is water blue? Why is fire red even at night, if no light can make its color?”

I think you will see then: The whole thing is not so simple as it seems to be.

Because of this, before we go on we have to go back in history to see, what people of the past undertook to get answers to these and similar questions. This will lead us to the emergence of human mind, thinking about itself and everything around us. On this journey to the past we will meet some of the great thinkers of the past, which called themselves “philosophers”, “lovers of wisdom”. One of their most important questions was: What is matter? We will see, how this question leads us to the great philosopher Demokrit, who proposed smallest parts to be existent, which he called “atoms”, “unsplitable” (he was wrong- and he was not, as we will see).

Most of these ancient thinkers made their “discoveries” only by using their mind, and thus many of their thoughts seem strange to us today, because we are used to the modern scientific method of making experiments and combining the results with mathematics to physical laws. Anyway, even one of the most stunning modern theories, the general theory of Relativity, was evaluated mainly not in huge particle accelerators, but in the mind of one man, and he had nothing than his brain, pens and paper to write on with his own hand, not the thinking power of millions of Terabytes and harddisks with gigantic storage capacity. (Of course Einstein used the results of experimantal physics for setting up his theory, he was a total modern physicist, but he was what we call a theoretical physicist, not an experimetal one. He used a few experimental observances and went on by using logic to create something new in his own mind. Thus he did mainly the same as the old philosophers, but with the instrument of highly developed mathematics.)

Now we have already set the frame around the image, and it is made of the words “matter” and “light”. These words are the basic words for dealing with

“color” and for answering the question “what is color?”.

· What is matter?

Let`s begin our journey into the past. The first scientists who thought about matter in the western world (at least from what we know of) were the so-called pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. There have been Indian and Buddhist philosophies already before, but for the development of the modern science the Greek philosophers were probably more important. I personally think there have always been theories about matter since mankind exists, but most is lost and was never written down anyway. Maybe ancient people even had a profund knowledge, who knows? But that’s all speculation. We should comncentrate on the Greek philosophers now.

They lived about 600 to 400 BC and asked questions like

“From where does everything come?’

“From what is everything created?”

“How might we describe nature mathematically?”

One of them was

Thales of Miletus

(ca. 624 BC–ca. 546 BC). Philosophy begins with Thales, as Bertram Russell[i] states.

He thought the world started from water, or with other words: The principle of all things is water.

What? A stone, the earth and the sun made from water? Maybe this Greek guy drank too much Retsina wine, or what is this?

But we should look what other people of his time wrote about him:

Aristotle[ii]: "That from which is everything that exists and from which it first becomes and into which it is rendered at last, its substance remaining under it, but transforming in qualities, that they say is the element and principle of things that are."

Aristotle again in his Metaphysics:[iii]:

"For it is necessary that there be some nature, either one or more than one, from which become the other things of the object being saved... Thales the founder of this type of philosophy says that it is water.”

That sounds a little bit different, but still – everything made from water???

If we additionally know, that Thales maybe thought of moist substance turning into air, slime and earth [Heraclitus Homericus[iv]] and drew his conlusions by this, we might judge his “theory” a little bit different. Isn`t this what makes up science: making an observation and draw conclusions from it?

We are not alone if we think, this “first philosopher” came to strange conclusions. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher of the late 19^th century, wrote in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks: [v]

"Greek philosophy seems to begin with an absurd notion, with the proposition that water is the primal origin and the womb of all things. Is it really necessary for us to take serious notice of this proposition? It is, and for three reasons. First, because it tells us something about the primal origin of all things; second, because it does so in language devoid of image or fable, and finally, because contained in it, if only embryonically, is the thought, 'all things are one.' "

Others aknowledge that Thales noticed a substance remains the same in different states of aggregation. This already sounds pretty modern, doesn`t it? And when did you realize that the steam coming out of your Mom`s cooking pot (oh, sorry, of your Dad`s as well) is still water? So this Greek guy was probably not so drunk as we first thought when he set up his observations and theories.

Later we will see another stunning fact more detailed, which I only mention here short: Suns for real consist of Hydrogen (the “water former”) in their beginning, and they burn this Hydrogen to Helium, then to other heavier atoms inside themselves. Such it is somehow true – the matter on earth was made not from water, but from the atoms that form water. And all this happened and happens inside the sun – so we are real children of the stars!

I hope you will not say now I drank too much during writing this!

Another of these old Greeks was

Anaximenes

.....

[i] Russell, Bertrand. "The History of Western Philosophy." 1945

[ii] Metaphysics 983 b6 8-11