(January 7, 2019 at 4:26 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Back in the day when Newton explained the light Goethe was appalled thinking that this somehow destroys the "magic" of the world by explaining the mysterious and he even wrote his own book in which he tried to un-explain light and make it mystical again.
But Goethe's fears were in vain because knowing more about light made us enjoy light even more in numerous ways and devices.
This is a false and unfair thing to say about Goethe.
He had no interest in mystifying things. He wanted to find the truth.
When new scientific theories and explanations are offered, it is wrong to accept them immediately without challenging them and working hard to confirm or falsify them. We have the advantage, now, of knowing that Newton got most things right. This was not the case in Goethe's time. Nor was Goethe offering some kind of spooky or occult explanation as an alternative.
Goethe made a huge number of empirical tests about how people perceive color. He gathered data. He refused to offer an overall explanation, or even a real theory (despite the English title of his book on color) but made significant contributions to our understanding of how people perceive color.
Goethe looked at the experiential or phenomenological aspects of color perception, including how the meat eyeballs that we are equipped with influence what we see. This was not the same as Newton's interest, which was more of a purely physics based, not perceptual view.
It is true that Goethe was wrong about a number of things in this field. For example, he considered dark to be a thing rather than an absence. To blame him, however, for trying to mystify light is simply false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours
