What happened? Well, as former Nautilus editor Amos Zeeberg wrote in The Atlantic recently, “Don McPherson, the chief scientist and cofounder of EnChroma, says their glasses can help those with red-green colorblindness see more of these bright, beautiful colors that other people see.” Other people-that is, most of us-have in our eyes three kinds of cone cells, or photoreceptors, that are “sensitive during daylight-level illumination, so when the world is bright enough for us to see colors well, our cones are operating,” Chirimuuta says. Removing the packaging from his lap, he hunches over, elbows on knees, one hand taking off the glasses, the other rubbing his eyes. As he lifts them to his face, you can faintly hear one relative saying, “It’ll correct your eyes so that you’ll see how you’re supposed to see.” As soon as he’s had a peek through them, he seems to lose the ability to sit up straight. To understand her theory, consider the case of one of the many folks emotionally overwhelmed after trying on glasses, made by EnChroma, that correct for colorblindness: This 66-year-old grandpa, for instance, got them as a gift from his family. Our brains color the world we don’t see the world’s color. The magic of that moment inspired him to become a scientist, and now he’s the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, where many greats, like Einstein, once worked.Īn experience like that, though, may lead you to think, as the philosopher of science Mazviita Chirimuuta put it, “‘Oh, well, color is just wavelength of light and in the world around us, different objects reflect different wavelengths of light therefore we see them as having different colors.’ But actually, it’s not like that.”Ĭhirimuuta proposed a new theory of color in her 2015 book, Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy, called “color adverbialism.” One vision scientist inadvertently described it this month, in Slate, after explaining how science came to grips with the never-ending saga of “The Dress.” Robbert, holding a prism to the beam, found that it was like “holding a rainbow in your hand.” The prism, as Newton had observed centuries before, divided the white light, by refraction, into its constituent colors. One time, they closed the shades so only a sliver of photons could pass through. It was dark inside except for the light streaming in from one window. When Robbert Dijkgraaf was a little boy, growing up in the Netherlands, he’d play in his home attic after school, often with a friend. Our readers have come to expect excellence from our products, and they can count on us to maintain a commitment to producing rigorous and innovative information products in whatever forms the future of publishing may bring.Since our experience of color is mediated by neurobiological processes, there’s been a tendency in the philosophy of color to argue that color-rather than being a property or feature of an object-is actually an illusion. Through our commitment to new products-whether digital journals or entirely new forms of communication-we have continued to look for the most efficient and effective means to serve our readership. Since the late 1960s, we have experimented with generation after generation of electronic publishing tools. The Press's enthusiasm for innovation is reflected in our continuing exploration of this frontier. We were among the first university presses to offer titles electronically and we continue to adopt technologies that allow us to better support the scholarly mission and disseminate our content widely. Among the largest university presses in the world, The MIT Press publishes over 200 new books each year along with 30 journals in the arts and humanities, economics, international affairs, history, political science, science and technology along with other disciplines.