Name: Bright earth
ISBN: 9780226036281

Bright earth

"Bright Earth provides a glimpse into a little-explored avenue in the history of art and science: the creation of pigments and dyes and their influence on painting, as well as on fashion, merchandising, and the textile and chemical industries. For as long as artists have turned their dreams into images, they have relied on technical knowledge to supply their materials. Today almost every shade imaginable is easily available in off-the-shelf tubes; every hue and tincture is manufactured and ready for immediate use by the painter. But up until the eighteenth century, most artists ground and mixed their own pigments, and by necessity had considerable skill as a practical chemists."--Jacket.

What Hacker News says

getpostJan 2021

"From Egyptian wall paintings to the Venetian Renaissance, impressionism to digital images, Philip Ball tells the fascinating story of how art, chemistry, and technology have interacted throughout the ages to render the gorgeous hues we admire on our walls and in our museums."

Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color Paperback – Illustrated, April 15, 2003 https://www.amazon.com/Bright-Earth-Art-Invention-Color/dp/0...

https://www.philipball.co.uk/

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billfruitJan 2021

Also "Bright Earth : Invention of Colour" by Philip Ball.

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pseudolusJan 2019

Try "Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Colour" by Phillip Ball. [0]. If you're just interested in the colour blue there's also "Blue: The History of a Color" by Michel Pastoureau [1]. The Pastoureau book is more of an overview of art history than a discussion of the history underlying the discovery of the pigment itself.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Bright-Earth-Art-Invention-Color/dp/0...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blue-History-Color-Michel-Pastoureau/...

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Jason_ProtellApr 2024

From YouTube

00:00 Intro - what is the secret of life?

04:09 Is the human genome a blueprint or a musical score?

7:58 Crick's central dogma of biology

12:03 What scientists got wrong about genes and proteins

18:50 Why evolution chose disordered proteins

22:27 The process of gene regulation

27:03 Why life doesn't work like clockwork

30:29 The growth of intestinal villi

32:18 Why do we have five fingers?

34:55 Causal emergence

38:09 Do all parts of us have their own agency?

42:46 How does this affect genetic approaches to medicine?

48:09 Why do organisms exist at all?

Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. There is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles.

In this talk, discover why some researchers believe that, thanks to incredible scientific advancements, we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including 'H2O: A Biography of Water', 'Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour', 'The Music Instinct', and 'Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything'.

Philip's book 'Critical Mass' won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. He is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is the author of 'The Modern Myths' and lives in London.

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hilbert42Jan 2021

I'd confidently say that these days many people haven't much of a clue about the full range of the shades of blues that their eyes can actually see and if they did then they'd be rather surprised!

Unless you're a gardener or a flower grower who specializes in blue flowers or a lepidopterist specializing in blue butterflies you'll have spent most of your life looking at a very limited range of blues. You many think you've seen many shades of blue and you probably have except that most of the blues you've seen have come from a very limited range of dyes and pigments—in essence, your normal viewing experience of blues comes from this rather limited subset. These you'll encounter as pure dyes or pigments or various mixtures thereof. To provide light shades of blue white is added and to make the blue hue appear 'richer' small amounts of other colors, typically red, are added (it's a form of cheating/fooling the eye so to speak).

Right: that seems like many shades of blue available—and it is—but each of this limited range of dyes and pigments has its own intrinsic characteristic spectral response, thus each blue has an underlying 'characteristic blue' appearance common (and often recognizable) to all those shades and intensities. The trouble is that our eyes are remarkably discerning and they can see a much larger range of blues that exist outside our present commonly available range of blues.

Superficially, there seems to be a sufficiently large range of blue dyes and pigments available for our needs; for example, to name the more common, Azo dyes (diazo blue), indigo (jeans blue), Prussian blue, lapis lazuli (ultramarine), cobalt blue, copper-based blues–Egyptian blue, azurite, etc. However, the range of available blues is quite limited when one takes into consideration the physical and chemical properties of each dye and pigment, as sufficient numbers are either unstable and or are not suited to the industrial processes (printing, dying plastics, clothes dying, etc.), or they're rare and hellishly expensive (lapis lazuli for instance).

Another reason many haven't experienced the full spectrum of blues the eye is capable of perceiving is that blues aren't all that common in nature. It's worth taking a few minutes to watch this YouTube video titled "Why Is Blue So Rare In Nature?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g246c6Bv58. (Given the fact that blue is so rare in nature, what surprises me is the unanswered question of why the human eye has nevertheless thus evolved to be so discerning in the blue region—anyone any ideas?)

This brings me to the next point, which is to mention how a curious person can easily check his or her eyeballs out on a range of extended blues that are outside those that we normally encounter (à la those listed above). Several decades ago, I attended an electronics engineering conference where much of the subject matter was on the colorimetry of color television and I was thinking about the fact that the color gamut of television was limited by the comparatively poor performance of the blue phosphor (amongst other things). Not being in my home city, between conference times I found myself occupied wandering through the nearby park where to my surprise I stumbled across a conservatory full of brilliantly colored cineraria flowers (Pericallis × hybrida), many of which where dazzling shades of blue—blues that were way outside the color gamut range of normal color film, color TV, printing and dyed objects.

As colorimetry has occupied part of my career for years, I'm very perceptive of color and coming across a huge variety of brilliantly colored cineraria was quite an eye-opener [duh]. Cineraria come in all sorts of dazzling colors but those that I'm principally interested in are the blue ones. There are two interesting properties of many (but not all) cineraria flowers and they are that the color of their petals is most intense (saturated) at their outermost extent and that this color progressively and completely fades to pure white near the center of the flower; and second, there is a phenomenal range of hues and levels of saturation within each color group (with the blues being the most spectacular). (If you're unfamiliar with cineraria, do an image search on "blue" + "cineraria".)

The important aspect of seeing cineraria in public gardens' conservatories is that one can see, compare, and experience this vast variety of colors that would be very rare to experience elsewhere. Whenever I'm in a city for the first time, I'll often check to see if there's a cineraria conservatory there. Of the best two conservatories I've come across one is in Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, Chester County, PA, https://plantexplorer.longwoodgardens.org/weboi/oecgi2.exe/I...; and the other in Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne, Australia, https://vimeo.com/288066051, however I'm sure there are many more elsewhere. As I've stressed, the blue colors you'll see in the cineraria images in these links is only a rough guide to what you'll actually see in real life—the artificial colors just can't match the real thing! (If you intend to visit a cineraria conservatory then time it to be when the plants are in full bloom and do so on a bright day when natural daylight is at its peak.)

My commentary about cineraria isn't to put a scientific measure on what I've said but only to demonstrate that "A Good Blue Is Hard to Find" and it's always been so throughout history—and that you can demonstrate the fact for yourself just by looking at these flowers. Incidentally, the quoted text in the last sentence is the title of a book review in Scientific American by Peter G. Brown of Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color by Philip Ball (SciAm ISSN 0036-8733, Vol. 286, Nº 3, 2002, pp 98-100). There's more about the book below.

Finally, this brings me to the point about YInMn blue. I recall the announcement of its discovery in 2009 (as any new blue is a big deal). There is no doubt that it's sorely needed and that it will be a most welcome addition to the range of available blues (As yet, I've not seen it in the flesh but I'm eagerly awaiting the experience). There's no doubt that it will extent the range of blue hues and add considerable vibrancy to the color (soon expect to see important extensions (new numbers) to the blue range of Pantone colors). ;-)

While YInMn blue will go along way to improving the 'reproducible' blue spectrum, it nevertheless won't solve the blue problem completely. For starters, it's only useful for printed material and coloring physical objects, it doesn't help with the reproduction of electronic colors, TVs, displays etc. Also, there's still the need to give better vibrancy to the existing range of blues (ultimately, we still need to add vibrancy to the older [spectral] range blue dyes and pigments so as to balance them with the brighter, more vibrant YInMn blue).

If you're interested in the subject of color then the book 'Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color' by Philip Ball is an excellent place to start. The mentioned SciAm review isn't available on line but these two ought to suffice:

http://www.librarything.com/work/206920/reviews/68183903

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/jan/26/highereduc...

Note: I'm only familiar with the 2002 edition so I am unable to say whether Philip Ball has included the 2009 info about YInMn in his later 2010 and 2012 editions.

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