I was beginning to feel like a legend in my own mind, but it seems that in recent years other people have been making measurements of Goethe`s dark spectrum with modern instruments. This paper provides some context for Goethe`s work on colour theory and includes a graph of the spectral radiance curve of Goethe`s dark spectrum. Roughly speaking Newton`s light spectrum of blue-green-red emerges from a prism when it is stuck by light beam within a field of dark, whereas Goethe`s dark spectrum of yellow-magenta-cyan emerges from a prism when it is struck by a shadow beam within in a field of light.
I imagined there must be an infra-cyan and ultra-yellow beyond the visible part of Geothe`s dark spectrum so I was pleased to see those same terms are used in this paper. For those people who who turned off by the name of the journal and think all metaphysical jargon is woo-woo gooble-de-gook, I suggest you focus on the figures and the data: Goethe’s Farbenlehre from the Perspective of Modern Physics http://www.holisticsciencejournal.co.uk/id/In_dialogue Goethes Farbenlehre Grebe-Ellis and Passon.pdf The key finding is in the last figure which shows the spectral radiance curves for both the Newton light spectrum and the Goethe dark spectrum. Where the Newton spectral radiance curve peaks sharply in the infrared, there is a correspondingly pronounced dip in the Goethe spectral radiance curve in the infracyan. This paper on the same spectral radiance measurements might be more appealing for some: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.09063 Power Area Density in Inverse Spectra Matthias Rang, Johannes Grebe-Ellis Abstract <<In recent years, inverse spectra were investigated with imaging optics and a quantitative description with radiometric units was suggested (Rang 2015). It could be shown that inverse spectra complement each other additively to a constant intensity level. Since optical intensity in radiometric units is a power area density, it can be expected that energy densities of inverse spectra also fulfill an inversion equation and complement each other. In this contribution we report findings on a measurement of the power area density of inverse spectra for the near ultraviolet, visible and the infrared spectral range. They show the existence of corresponding spectral regions ultra-yellow (UY) and infra-cyan (IC) in the inverted spectrum and thereby present additional experimental evidence for equivalence of inverse spectra beyond the visible range.>> Harry
