The Color of the Future: A history of blue | Hacker News Reader

The Color of the Future: A history of blue

hopefulmons.com

130 pointsprismatic32 comments

I'm old enough to remember a time before blue LEDs. Funny how they're everywhere now.

I make photo prints using the cyanotype process and a UV LED light source. It's a combination of old and new technologies with a very unique look. While the sensitizing solution contains cyanide, it's fine as long as you wear gloves (and don't drink it).

I just received a blue laser as a throwaway free gift in a package of goods totalling about $50. It wasn't even advertised as a freebie in the website, not even at checkout.

It stuns me, because I am an old enough optical engineer to remember the excitement around the first blue laser. Also, who wants one? Not nearly as bright nor energy efficient as a red one (and the battery died with under a minute of use).

I kind of hate it because blue LEDs trigger my astigmatism so much worse at night than the good old green and orange ones that used to be on appliances. What's the point of a clock if it just looks like streaking blobs from across the room?

Growing up in the 2000s, I've come to associate blue LEDs with tacky cheap garbage appliances, as no sane manufacturer would treat their customers with such contempt. The brightest LEDs were always in the cheapest, lowest quality stuff. Especially the ultra-bright clear ones project onto the wall, with bonus points added for ones driven off unfiltered AC so they flicker as your eyes move around.

It is pretty impressive that such a tiny light can light up a whole room, but it's not the kind of impressive that makes it comfortable to sleep next to one.

The artist Alphonse Mucha associated blue with the past: "Black is the colour of bondage, blue is the past, yellow the joyous present, orange the glorious future."

Blue of course is a cold color. Perhaps one of the less eccentric colors, and ubiquitous as the author mentions. So in line with the disappearance of color from modern design, it is one of the few remaining colors in our vision of the future.

The use of Prussian blue is rampant in most painting programs. The reason is that you are essentially getting two paints for the price of one. When applied thinly, it is light and saturated. When applied thickly it is almost black. Contrast that with cobalt blue, which looks the same pretty much however you apply it.

Alizarin crimson behaves similarly.

Painting with either of these pigments it is relatively easy to get superficially impressive effects.

As a painter and also a digital artist, I am always amazed by such physical dimensions of oil paint. Another example is the huge difference between zinc white (low in coverage, good for transparency, slightly cold), and titanium white (high in coverage, good with mixing with other pigments, more neutral).

> It is the most technological color, and I’m willing to claim that this is why it is usually, in science fiction and elsewhere, used to represent the future.

For me it is because of red- and blueshifting[1]. Far away galaxies appear both older and redder the further away they are, so red is the past. And if you go really fast, the forward view will be bluer, so in the sense that it is where you go, blue is the future. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Blueshift

Don’t they also say we only started seeing blue as a distinct color recently? That gives it future vibes.

I think this is just a misunderstanding on how colors are referred to.

Yeah I remember before and it was really weird looking.

That’s exactly backwards. If the galaxies are turning red, you are in the future. If you they are turning blue, you are going into the past.

An analogy is that if everyone around you is getting older, similar to red shifted galaxies, it means time is advancing forward. If everyone was getting younger, then you’re going backward in time to the past.

Red is the future.

> Far away galaxies appear both older and redder the further away they are, so red is the past.

> If the galaxies are turning red, you are in the future.

Aren’t these statements saying the same thing?

At the Smart Museum in Chicago [0] I've seen Yves Klein's coffee table which uses copious amounts of the iconic International Klein Blue pigment under the transparent surface, it's very striking.

[0] https://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/building-enviro...

Shenzhen is not all futuristic blue all the time, as shown in the picture in the article. Most of those buildings have full RGB capability. Here's a drone video of Shenzhen at night.[1]

For the 45th anniversary of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone last month, the building lighting and rooftop lasers were coordinated with a 12,000 drone show.[2] Mostly white, some blue tinge, red buildings on the more official messages. Not much green. That's Shenzhen looking futuristic on purpose.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vz3mP3iMiw

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDNkcKiD2Ow

A beautiful book by Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (2001), the same content as the article in book form.

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-History-Color-Michel-Pastoureau/...

See also: a philosophical and lyrical take, "Bleuets" by Maggie Nelson (2019).

Blue fireworks look cool, but you almost never see them.

Fun fact about lapis lazuli/ultramarine: if you grind it too finely, it turns gray. A friend who has recreated many medieval paint pigments discovered this the hard way... Just another reason it is so complicated to produce.

The reason is that the crystalline structures that finely select for that narrow band of blue are destroyed. The same thing happens if you put an oil drop on water: at first brilliant rainbow bands of color are produced (from the selective reflections off either side of the oil, where the oil thickness is a multiple of the light quarter-wavelength). Then the oil spreads further, until it is less thick than a blue light quarter-wavelength, and it turns dark.

A similar phenomenon of interference between light reflecting off multiple layers of scales explains where some blue colors in butterfly wings come from. The technical term is "structural coloration".

Except for the oil slicks, where it is called "Newton's Rings". Also, it is a form of constructive interference.

> Finally you have ultramarine! How much? I can’t find good numbers, but Claude estimates that the ultramarine production of all of medieval Europe was around the order of 30 kg per year

So we're at that stage ? Scott Alexander asking Claude for estimates on unknown stuff and quoting it on that. Gosh, I didn't imagine the lack of awareness of the limits of LLMs was this bad.

For a fun story on Prussian Blue, read the first chapter of Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World.

How do you manage to write an entire article on blue without mentioning methylene blue?

Or manganese blue?

Or how do I blue thee, let me count the ways..

Periwinkle

Neon blue

Bluebonnet

Twin blue

Smalt

Savoy blue

Medium blue

Process blue

Liberty

Egyptian blue

International Klein Blue

Ultramarine

Dark blue

Picotee blue

Navy blue

Midnight blue

Independence

Cool black

Robin Egg Blue

Space cadet

Baby blue

Light blue

Powder blue

Uranian blue

Argentinian blue

Ruddy blue

Celtic blue

Spanish blue

Bleu de France

Delft blue

Duck blue

Resolution blue

Polynesian blue

Moroccan blue

Sapphire

Fluorescent blue

Teal blue

Never seen Fight Club?

Obligatory mention of the Radiolab episode titled 'Colors' [1] - which among other things, talks about how the color blue appears in almost all world languages much later than other colors.

[1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/211119-colors

I paint with blue fairly often. I understand that it might be the hardest to create artificially, but it is done regularly in the modern world.

Could the fascination be due to psychological reasons, like blue light being linked to sleep difficulties? This seems to be the current world we live in, where blue light filters exist to help prevent sleep disorders. Perhaps because our skies are increasingly gray with pollution, so blue gives us hope of a future where our air is clean and without smog?

I might be missing the entire point of the article, but I feel that if I am, my fellow HNers are with me (even if they don't believe the same thing).

I love this quote:

"Cultural associations: ... Something something near-far Robin Hanson something something"

> Nobody has written about this more eloquently than Scott Alexander: >

For any subject, there is certainly someone who's written more eloquently about it than Scott Alexander (who's quoted using the word "pissed" here).

He's bad because he used the word "pissed"? Oddly prurient of you.

In fairness, the quoted passage is bad because it quotes Claude as a reliable source for estimating medieval quantities of ultramarine produced, which is a terrible of an LLM…

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