(12) ...But What Did It Really Add Up To?

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The more I considered it, the more logical elegance began to look like just a surface characteristic. A related, yet far more fundamental issue also needed consideration:

If it was possible to obtain the same results with a variety of different triads of additive color "primaries," were all such triads necessarily equal in their ability to explain admixtures of color?

I focused more precisely on the phenomenon of the "register jump"--the change of "octave" when we add or subtract a unit of white. We get such jumps when we add just two of the so-called "primaries" of the "RBG" triad favored by contemporary physicists. (Physicists' "red" and green produce a shade of yellow that is far lighter than either original "source" color.) How could this be, unless one or both of the purported "primaries" contained elements of a third color, to complete a "unit of white?"

On the other hand, when we use the same primary colors that printers have been using successfully for decades to mix pigments, we experience no such "register jump"--no matter whether we are combining pigments or colored light. When there are no register jumps, and thus no inadvertent commingling of a third color, what is to be concluded other than that the colors we are using are more "pure" primaries? And isn't this characteristic of "purity" the ultimate basis of any claim that a color is "primary?"

As I paused to consider my conceptual progress, I realized that either I had discovered something truly significant, or I had slipped into a truly significant degree of crankitude.

Common sense made it difficult to believe I had stumbled onto something that the brilliance of Sir Isaac Newton and the generations of physicists who followed him had missed.

On the other hand, I was too stubborn to just dismiss what to my mind was a legitimately reasoned out conclusion.

© COPYRIGHT 1993 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.