Newton, Goethe and the Process of Perception: an approach to Design

Figure 1

2. Goethe's experiments An illustrative starting experiment is shown in figure 1. When a white circle or white square on a black background is looked at through a prism, the black/white boundary disintegrates into red/orange/yellow or violet/indigo/blue, depending on whether the white is below or above the black. A checkerboard (figure 2) provides a powerful illustration of this. Note that the colours result only from light from the two extremes of the spectrum; they do not feature green, from the middle. Figure 2