In your opinion: Who's right on the theory of colours.... Newton or Goethe?

Question

For those not educated in the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours

The section entitled "Newton and Goethe" has the best brief description.

Answer 1

Newton is right.!:)

Answer 2

This is a topic I've studied extensively.

This disagreement between Goethe and Newton was one of the defining moments in the history of science.  

Newton brought reductionism in science to a whole new level ... so much so that the scientific method itself was practically redefined in terms of reductionism.   Reductionism is the tactic of *reducing* phenomena down to separate parts, so we can analyze them separately.   Newton reduced the question of color down to research about *light*.  That image of Newton splitting white light into its component colors is iconic ... it is science in its purest form as redefined by Newton ... separating nature into its component parts.

Goethe was not reductionist, but holistic.  This means that he felt that the tendency to break nature down into parts was fundamentally the wrong approach, and that we should examine things as a *whole*.   As an example, his prism experiments did not narrow the beam (as Newton did) to split colors up, but widened the beam to keep the white light whole, and concentrated on the colors at the fringes of the beam.  To Goethe, color was an interraction between light and dark.

In retrospect, Newton and Goethe were looking at two very different aspects of color.  Newton managed to break the problem down so well to be questions about *light*, while Goethe focused on the *experience* of color ... what we today would call *perception*.   As such, Goethe raised a lot a great questions, using experiments, that Newton's model could not answer.  For example, Goethe concentrated on the fact that many colors seem to be opposed to each other (see the color wheel diagram).  We now know this (in our modern reductionist way) to be due to the way our nervous system is set up, and how some nerves in the retina are wired to respond to the *absence* of certain colors ... but the fact that Goethe noticed the opposition is an important observation that Newton's purely light-based approach could not answer.

Newton's approach eventually won out, because it was incredibly successful at building models that made predictions, so much so that this process redefined science itself.

So it is really hard for us, after 300 years of science as redefined by Newton, to see science through anything but Newtonian eyes.  Goethe's approach seems quaint, poetic, but basically non-scientific.  He was great at discovering phenomena that required explanation, but not as good at finding those explanations in a way that led to testable predictions.

So it is tempting to see Newton as "right" and Goethe as "wrong", but doing so too quickly misses a great opportunity to really think about what science *is*.    

In other words, Newton is more scientifically "right" only because Newton was so successful that he effectively *redefined science* to be equivalent to his approach.

Answer 3

newton is always right

Answer 4

Newton of course always. Duh!!! LOL!!!