The aim of this book is to assemble a series of chapters, written by experts in their fields, covering the basics of color - and then some more. In this way, readers are supplied with almost anything they want to know about color outside their own area of expertise. Thus, the color measurement expert, as well as the general reader, can find here information on the perception, causes, and uses of color. For the artist there are details on the causes, measurement, perception, and reproduction of color. Within each chapter, authors were requested to indicate directions of future efforts, where applicable.
One might reasonably expect that all would have been learned about color in the more than three hundred years since Newton established the fundamentals of color science. This is not true because:
• the measurement of color still has unresolved complexities (Chapter 2)
• many of the fine details of color vision remain unknown (Chapter 3)
• every few decades a new movement in art discovers original ways to use new pigments, and dyes continue to be discovered (Chapter 5)
• the philosophical approach to color has not yet crystallized (Chapter 7)
• new pigments and dyes continue to be discovered (Chapters 10 and 11)
• the study of the biological and therapeutic effects of color is still in its infancy (Chapter 2).
Color continues to develop towards maturity and the editor believes that there is much common ground between the sciences and the arts and that color is a major connecting bridge.
Editor Kurt Nassau is active as author, lecturer and consultant. He holds degrees from the Universities of Bristol and Pittsburgh. He recently retired as Distinguished Research Scientist after 30 years at AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked in a wide range of areas covering the preparation, chemistry and physics of laser crystals, semiconductors, superconductors, non-linear optical crystals, and glasses, among others. He has also performed medical research at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, DC while in the US Army and taught graduate students as Visiting Professor at Princeton University. In addition to The Physics and Chemistry of Color: The Fifteen Causes of Color, he has also written Experimenting with Color for teenagers and two books on the history, science and the state of the art of gemstone synthesis and of gemstone enhancement, as well as the "Colour" article used in the Encyclopaedia Britannica since 1988.
