After centuries of trying, we’ve yet to arrive at a perfect way to map colour

Can colour be understood geometrically? If so, what’s the best way to map it out, capturing the variables of hue, brightness and saturation? These questions have deep implications for art, physics and perception, and have been pondered for centuries. In this extraordinary dive into how thinkers from Isaac Newton to today have mapped colour, the French video essayist Alessandro Roussel of the YouTube channel ScienceClic makes the case that there’s not just one way to map colour in two or three dimensions, but many – each of them communicating different truths about the nature of the phenomenon. To capture the mutable nature of colour in the human experience, and our always-evolving understanding of it, Roussel concludes with the fascinating story of ‘olo’ – a new ‘impossible colour’, outside of the usual visible spectrum, which scientists were only recently able to produce in the laboratory.