Colour - What We Really See

Send us Fan Mail In the 1660s, Isaac Newton sat alone in the dark—and drove a needle behind his eye. Not out of madness, but to understand light. Centuries earlier, Homer described the sea not as blue, but wine-dark. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the colour blue is never mentioned. Not once. This absence haunted William Gladstone. Scholar. Statesman. Obsessive. He scoured ancient texts, The Bible. The Vedas. The Koran. Still no blue. Only silence. Except in Egypt, where the dead were painted ...