As humans interact with the world each and every day, not a second goes by without the use of one of the five senses. Of these, sight is arguably the most useful. With perception and visuals being such a key component of life, it is no surprise that scientists would want to understand every minute detail about how vision works.
Movies and other visual media are the primary carriers of entertainment through sight, and the easiest way to change the feel of a scene or alter the emotional impact is with color. This narrows into the question Schrödinger and other scientists were trying to answer: What causes humans to perceive color?
In the 19th century, mathematician Bernhard Riemann proposed that color perception may be categorized into curved spaces as opposed to flat ones. This can be simplified into the idea of diminishing returns, where, for example, a sudden shift from a very light to a very dark blue would be perceived as less of a change than the sum of many gradual changes across that spectrum of blues. This proposition was backed by the theory of Erwin Schrödinger in the 1920s, who further added that color could be categorized into three non-Euclidean (curved) spaces that we know today as hue, saturation, and brightness. Schrödinger attempted to prove this theory through the use of Riemannian geometry, essentially the study of distance over curved surfaces; however, his model was incomplete.
At Los Alamos National Laboratory, Roxana Bujack led a team of scientists aiming to continue and complete the theory proposed by Schrödinger. The original idea for a three-space color spectrum emerges from the types of cone cells in human eyes, each sensitive to red, blue, and green light, respectively. To enable this model, Schrödinger chose to center the spaces around a neutral axis — a line of gray tones running from black to white. The initial definitions of color perception were tied to where the colors were positionally from the neutral axis, these positions were never mathematically defined. One of the most prominent achievements of the team was the mathematical establishment of this neutral axis purely from the geometry of the color spectrum, finally providing ground for the theory to stand on. The team then went on to correct other known issues with the theory, most prominently the Bezold-Brücke effect. In the original model, increasing brightness in a color would cause a notable shift in hue. The solution to this was a shift in thinking, where instead of assuming colors move along a straight path, they instead move along the shortest possible path within the geometric space, thus accounting for the diminishing returns aspect of the color space.
Across the United States, there are 42 Federally Funded Research & Development Centers (FFRDCs), with Los Alamos being a single standout location. Of 181.4 billion dollars spent towards R&D across the country, around (as of 2024 budget) 103.6 million dollars went to Los Alamos’ internal research funding — about 2-3 million of which was spent on a single research project, such as the one conducted by Bujack and their team.
With only ~0.0014% of total funding in 2026 going towards this project, it is evident that the goal itself was an undertaking of very little interest to researchers as a whole. Despite this, any advancement to visualization science could mean major steps forward in the world of photography, videography, and data analysis. Finer use of equipment due to a new and complete understanding of the color spectrum could lead to more energy-efficient or cost-effective technology in the future, and the idea of finally piecing together a century-old theory put into place by two of the most notable mathematicians and scientists in history is undoubtedly awesome.
