Color Uncovered. Produced by the Exploratorium.
Reviwed by Carl Zimmer
Late in his life, Claude Monet developed cataracts. As his lenses
degraded, they blocked parts of the visible spectrum, and the colors he
perceived grew muddy. Monet's cataracts left him struggling to paint; he
complained to friends that he felt as if he saw everything in a fog.
After years of failed treatments, he agreed at age 82 to have the lens
of his left eye completely removed. Light could now stream through the
opening unimpeded. Monet could now see familiar colors again. And he
could also see colors he had never seen before. Monet began to see--and
to paint--in ultraviolet.
We can turn light into vision thanks to the pigments in our eyes,
which snatch photons and trigger electric signals that travel to our
brains. We have three types of pigments tuned to violet, green, and red
light. Birds, bees, and many other animals have additional pigments
tuned to ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet vision has led to the evolution
of ultraviolet color patterns. In some butterfly species, for example,
the males and females look identical to the ordinary human eye. In UV
light, however, the males sport bright patterns on their wings to
attract the females. Many flowers have ultraviolet colors, often using
them to get the attention of pollinating bees.
While each kind of pigment responds most strongly to a particular
color, it can also respond more weakly to neighboring parts of the
spectrum. The violet-tuned pigment, for example,can respond wealy to
ultraviolet light, which has a higher frequency. Most of us don't get to
experience that response, because our lenses
filter out UV rays.
But Monet did. With his lens removed, Monet continued to paint.
Flowers remained one of his favorite subjects. Only now the flowers were
different. When most people look at water lily flowers, they appear
white. After his cataract surgery, Monet's blue-tuned pigments could
grab some of the UV light bouncing off of the petals. He started to
paint the flowers a whitish-blue.
I just learned about Monet's super-vision while reading the lovely
Color Uncovered,
produced recently for the iPad by the Exploratorium of San Francisco,
one of the best science museums on Earth. I don't quite know what to
call
Color Uncovered. Its iTunes page describes it as "an
interactive book that features fascinating illusions, articles, and
videos." Yet it feels like an elegantly designed museum exhibit poured
into an iPad. Making matters more confusing, you have to go to the
education category of the app store in iTunes to find it. When it comes
to describing what it is we review here at Download the Universe, words
often fail us. Sometimes that's a bad thing, because we're reviewing
muddled products of muddled minds. In other cases--like this one--it
just means that someone is making good use of several different genres,
and melding them into something for which there's no good label.
One challenge to this kind of mixing is that different kinds of
presentation work well in different formats. As a science writer, I know
that the straight-news style of a story for the
New York Times
will fall hard on its face in a blog post. If you try to write a book
as 20 magazine features, you'll end up with a disjointed mess.
Television scripts have their own rules, as do tweets. I encountered the
hardest rules of all while working on a
museum exhibit.
I had to write legends for a collection of objects ranging from whale
bones to finch beaks. My instructions basically ran as follows: your
audience is made up of ten-year-olds who are running through the room.
You have to stop them and explain what they're looking at. And you only
have fifty words in which to do so. Go.
Museum exhibits are good training for writing about science on apps.
Color Uncovered
contains 17 "chapters" covering a wide range of subjects related to
color, from optical illusions to food dyes to why dogs shouldn't drive
(they can't see stop signs). The text is sharp and concise. It doesn't
delve deeply, the way a full-blown book might, but it does deliver
instructive facts and stories. While children may get the most out of
it, this adult enjoyed it as well.
Museum exhibit designers are also accustomed to combining text with
images and interactive experiences, which is crucial for good ebook
design.
Colors Unlimited contains the classic afterimage
illusion, for example, but it uses a built-in timer and other tricks to
help you appreciate how your eyes create a color illusion after staring
at an image for 30 seconds. It is even so bold as to instruct you to put
a drop of water on the iPad screen, so that you can see how a white
circle is created by red, green, and blue pixels.
Colors Unlimited doesn't last long. You'll probably spend as
much time as you might strolling through a museum exhibit on the same
subject. But you'll come away having learned something interesting, and,
unlike many museums,
Color Uncovered is free. In this case, you get a lot more than you paid for.
