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COLOR is a fact of perception
not an objective part or characteristic of a substance. Color is a feature
of vision; it is a psychophysical response consisting of the physical
reaction of the eye and the automatic interpretive
reply of the brain to wavelength characteristics of light above a certain
brightness level (at lower levels the eye senses brightness differences
but is unable to make color discriminations).
That light as the source of color was first showed in 1666 by Isaac Newton,
who passed a beam of sunlight through a glass prism, producing the rainbow
of hues of the visible spectrum. This phenomenon had often been noted
before, but it had always been related to latent color that was said to
exist in the glass of the prism. Newton, however, took this easy experiment
a step further. He passed his miniature rainbow through a second prism
that reconstituted the original white beam of light and his conclusion
was revolutionary: color is in the light, not in the glass, and the light
people see as white is a combination of all the colors of the visible
spectrum.
The reason rainbows come out colored is because the light is broken down
into its constituent parts by passing through the water droplets in the
air.
The theory of color has gone through some changes over time, and it is
now an accepted fact that color is truly in the eye of the beholder.
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