Camera pioneer Eastman Kodak files for bankruptcy

COLORS, OPTICS, AND RACISM

What if you were asked to upset all the painfully learned laws of optics? What if you were presented with the hypothesis that white was the absence of all colors, instead of the accumulation of all colors?

Mr. Lucien Bonnet, a Haitian-born Montrealer and a self-made specialist in the field of optics, states with conviction that blackness is an integral part of the light and color process; he has had a lot of trouble getting laboratories to give him exact copies of photos in which the superposition of films (yellow, magenta, Gray and cyan) produces a black contour, even though the picture was taken in broad daylight.

Why does Mr. Bonnet keep on insisting on this point? Behind the scenes at the 17th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union, he kept hammering on that unorthodox theory, which, if it were adopted, would condemn to oblivion a number of authors of physics textbooks.

Mr. Bonnet has written to Professor Carl Sagan, a NASA astrophysicist. He has seen to it that this letter was published and he still believes that the scientific world as a whole — especially the world of optics — is not particularly interested in verifying all hypotheses.

Optics, he writes, “is the exclusive preserve of the scientific world, that beloved field whose seemingly complicated and dangerous approaches are actually transparently obvious.”

We may easily guess that, through his research, Mr. Bonnet is trying to set right people’s perspectives, to get to the very bottom of anti-Black racism. He says, “The bottom of things is veiled by ways of thinking” and “Sometimes, facts are so obvious that they “hit you in the eye” but, like ostriches, people bury their heads in the sand.”

Will Mr. Bonnet’s persistence overcome what he calls “aberrant scientific taboos”? He is, of course, aware of Asimov’s work on Black Holes. Professor Sagan had already let it be known, in everyday language, that scientists had felt depressed when they found out that the lunar sky was black… So they had better base their work on Mars with its pink sky!

“Thinkers like Jacquard may praise differences, but the impact of such statements does not succeed in shaking the scientific and industrial establishment — who can measure the true influence of Kodak? — which is quite comfortable in its Newtonian strait jacket,” says Mr. Bonnet. However, he pays tribute to the researcher’s mentality of his former teachers, the Fathers of the Holy Ghost, who did not hesitate to give him high marks, even though his work ran counter to the official teachings.

Clément Trudel
Article published in the Montreal daily newspaper Le Devoir on Saturday, August 25, 1979.

http://www.contact-canadahaiti.ca/

WESTERN SCIENCE VERSUS THE BLACKS

NEWTON’S THEORY OF COLORS

Following the article I published in the Montreal daily newspaper Le Devoir on February 26, 1986 concerning anti-Black prejudice in the West, the newspaper received reactions from all over Canada, both from the Black community and from scientific circles. Most people who reached me, while completely agreeing with me in my analysis of the deep causes of those prejudices, stated that they were not fully satisfied with what I said about the harmfulness of these prejudices in the scientific field, especially when I mentioned, as an example of that contagion, Newton’s Theory of colors.

Since not enough space was available in the paper, I could not express my point of view in detail. So I will now give a concise demonstration of why Newton’s Theory of Colors is false.

First of all, what is Newton’s Theory of Colors? Let me remind readers that the concept of “color” that stems from scientific experimentation is based on the demonstration in 1665 by the well-known scientist Isaac Newton.

This experiment consists in running a visible light ray called “white light” through a prism in a dark room, breaking down that light into a continuous spectrum encompassing all the colors.

Newton thought he had there by proven that white light is broken down by the prism into a series of seven refracted rays which produced the colors from red to violet on the screen on which they are projected. He therefore concluded that white light contains various lights, each one of which is darker than the white light itself and each of which is part of the whole. And the darkest of all (real blackness), according to Newton, is simply an absence of light.

My point of view, which is shared by many scientists, is that when the dark room, which is actually black, is penetrated by the “visible light ray”, it turns into an area with a mixture of darkness and white light, so that it is no longer a “dark room”. This is the origin of “Newton’s error”, which is the result of an incorrect observation.

In other words, the basic elements of his experiment are not what he thought they were: in the course of the experiment, we are actually dealing with a quasi-dark or quasi-white room. Consequently, the prism in that quasi-dark room reflects the real situation; that is to say, the prism itself is already under the influence of this mixture of white light and darkness. That fact escaped Newton’s notice.

In fact, the prism in the dark room where the experiment was carried out receives darkness from one angle and a beam of white light from the other. The prism thereby puts these two elements into action. The incident light ray is transformed, softened under the effect of the surrounding shade. Acting as a wave mixer, the prism integrates the white light and the darkness. It synthesizes them in vitro based on a given degree in the well-known “Gray scale” used in photography and color television. Under the effect of the incident ray, which acts like a projector, the refracted, very subtle gray ray passes through the prism. The continuous spectrum of all the colors is formed in a quasi-dark room on a quasi-white screen, given that the spectrum was born of both white light and darkness.

We therefore find that the continuous color scale, as we know it, is constituted by the breaking down, not of white light, but a mixture of white light and darkness — that is, of “gray”. As the German scholar Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: “This is the proof of the existence of the law where by light is nothing else than a mixture of light and darkness, to different degrees.” [our translation] Thus, Newton’s theory of colors proves to be completely false.

Nevertheless, the techniques used in industries dealing with photography, cinematography and television are still based on that erroneous theory.

In photography, laboratories are quick to discover in their work that the sum of the colors of the spectrum is gray, not white. That is why they are compelled to introduce the black color to obtain the white. There you have a demonstration in reverse that black is an integral part of light and color processes. Remember that this fact completely escaped Newton’s notice. Unfortunately, even though, in their use and application of the color scale, photo labs notice Newton’s error and correct it in practice, they still do not make the error more widely known.

Why ?

Some people might say that big industries using color processes — printing, photography, movies, television and even microprocessors — keep to that erroneous theory for the sake of major financial interests, especially concerning patents and trade secrets. In addition, certain anti-Black prejudices, deeply rooted in Western culture as well as in the field of optics, have to be taken into account at this “phase of rest and almost stagnation, rather than theoretical progress”.

It is then up to the scientific world today — researchers, university professors, etc. — to overcome such hindrances and correct Newton’s theory, in order to free the way for progress.

Lucien Bonnet

http://www.contact-canadahaiti.ca

Article published in the Montreal daily newspaper Le Devoir on April 15, 1986. The author of the article, a Haitian-born Montrealer, has made a movie entitled “Où vas-tu, Haiti?” (“Where are you Heading, Haiti?”)