Very pleased that my letter “Music inspired Newton’s rainbow” has now been published online in Nature Vol 250 (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v520/n7548/pdf/520436a.pdf). Even more pleasingly, Nature chose to illustrate my letter with the cartoon above, and cartoonist Sidney Harris (highly recommended; see ScienceCartoonsPlus.com) has kindly permitted me to use it here and on Twitter. Thanks, Sidney!
From the letter: “The mediaeval rainbow had just five colours: red, yellow, green, blue and violet. But Newton added two more – orange and indigo”.
In fact, Newton did not himself “see” the colours, but relied on his assistant, whom he said had much better vision than himself. The background, though, is that Newton believed that the rainbow should have seven colours, because his view of the harmony of nature required that the colours should be “divided after the manner of a Musical Chord” (Opticks p.127). When his assistant claimed to see the extra colours, Newton grabbed on to this willingly. As I say in the Nature letter (which cannot be reproduced in full here for copyright reasons) “It gives the lie to the old saying that artists see what they believe, but scientists believe what they see.”
IMAGE: ©ScienceCartoonsPlus.com
That’s a fun fact! One lesson to be drawn from this incident is how the rational and irrational are entwined in even the greatest scientific minds. By “musical chord”, Newton apparently means the white notes of a piano.But this seven note scale has no particular absolute value. Scales with other numbers of notes are the norm in other times and other cultures. Pentatonic (five note) scales, in harmony with the medieval rainbow, are very common. And even if this particular scale was absolute in some way, why should there be an analogy between rainbows and musical scales? Anyone for “the music of the spheres” to help understand planetary orbits?
I’m not the one to develop this further, but I can see that the parallel between music and colors has a history that could be explored, as does the question of the subjectivity of color perception. Thomas Young, Goethe, and John Herschel all thought there was more to color than Newton’s refrangibility. I hope someone runs with this germ of a project.