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Newton’s Color Theory, ca. 1665

4-5 m inutes

COLOR
NOTES: In Newton’s color wheel, in which the colors are arranged
clockwise in the order they appear in the rainbow, each “spoke” of the
wheel is assigned a letter. These letters correspond to the notes of the
musical scale (in this case—the Dorian mode—the scale starts on D with
no sharps or flats). Newton devised this color-music analogy because he
thought that the color violet was a kind of recurrence of the color red in the
same way that musical notes recur octaves apart. He introduced orange
and indigo at the points in the scale where half steps occur: between E and
F (orange) and B and C (indigo) to complete the octave.ISAAK
NEWTON, WIKIMEDIA COMMONSAround 1665, when Isaac
Newton first passed white light through a prism and watched it fan
out into a rainbow, he identified seven constituent colors—red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and...

Naming seven colors to correspond to seven notes is “a kind of

very strange and interesting thing for him to have done,” says Peter
Pesic, physicist, pianist, and author of the 2014 book Music and the
Making of Modern Science. “It has no justification in experiment
exactly; it just represents something that he’s imposing upon the
color spectrum by analogy with music.”

Of his rainbow experiment Newton wrote that he had projected

white light through a prism onto a wall and had a friend mark the

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Newton’s Color Theory, ca. 1665 | The Scientist Magazine® about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.the-scientist.com%2Ffounda...

boundaries between the colors, which Newton then named. In his

diagrams, which showed how colors corresponded to notes,
Newton introduced two colors—orange and indigo—corresponding
to half steps in the octatonic scale. Whether Newton’s friend
delineated indigo and orange on the wall or whether Newton added
those colors to his diagrams in order to better fit his analogy is
unclear, Pesic says. In any case, Newton’s inclusion of those two
colors had lasting consequences, Pesic wrote in his book: “For
those who came after, Newton’s musical analogy is the source of
the widely held opinion that orange and indigo are actually intrinsic
in the spectrum, despite the great difficulty (if not impossibility) of
distinguishing indigo from blue, or orange from yellow, in spectra.”

Newton persisted with his color theory despite later data he had
collected suggesting it was incorrect. When studying what are now
called Newton’s rings—as seen, for example, in the rainbow of
color in oily puddles—he noted that, according to the relationship
between radii of colored rings, the range from red to violet was
equivalent not to an octave but to something more like a major
sixth. According to Pesic, rather than changing his theory to match
the data, Newton came up with an erroneous explanation of how a
major sixth was equivalent to an octave.

But as both musicians and physicists know, the two are not
equivalent. In physics terminology, an octave is the frequency range
from x to 2x, and that premise holds true for musical octaves. If light
behaved like music, then photon frequencies of the spectrum would
also range from x to 2x, and their wavelengths, inversely
proportional to their frequencies, would too. Instead, the
wavelengths of visible light range from 400 to 700 nanometers,
which, if translated to sound waves, would be approximately
equivalent to a major sixth, Pesic says.

Although Newton’s color-music analogy falls apart, his prism

experiments showed that white light is actually a mix of different-
colored lights, and this work was “a crucial step toward
understanding the nature of light more deeply,” Pesic says. And
even if you can’t make out indigo in the rainbow, you probably know
ROY-G-BIV, which Pesic calls “a conventional expression of (and
homage to) Newton’s choice [to name seven colors in analogy to
music]—even though almost everyone has forgotten or did not
know the odd story of its origin.”

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