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Renowned poet and author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) claimed that his greatest contribution to the world was not his famous Faust (Part I in 1808 and Part II in 1832) or his best-selling 1774 epistolary novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werther [Sorrows of Young Werther], the first German novel to achieve international fame, but was instead his scientific treatise on optics and colors, Zur Farbenlehre [Towards a Theory of Color] from 1810. In his conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann recorded in his last few years of life, Goethe declared that there always had been and would continue to be many excellent poets but that only he achieved a true understanding of colors in his lifetime:
Auf Alles was ich als Poet geleistet habe, …bilde ich mir gar nichts ein. Es haben treffliche Dichter mit mir gelebt, es lebten noch Trefflichere vor mir, und es werden ihrer nach mir sein. Daß ich aber in meinem Jahrhundert in der schwierigen Wissenschaft der Farbenlehre der einzige bin, der das Rechte weiß, darauf tue ich mir etwas zu gute, und ich habe daher ein Bewußtsein der Superiorität über Viele.
[In terms of everything that I have accomplished as a poet, …I don't have any illusions. There have been excellent poets who lived at the same time as I, and those who were even better before me, and there will be more of them after me. That I am the only one in my century who is right in the difficult science of color theory-that I do attribute to myself and I am conscious in that regard of being superior over many.]1
Despite his global literary fame, Goethe repeatedly asserted that his long-term, hands-on experiments with light and color were his greatest achievement. For the most part, his optical experiments on light were received by his friends and the scientific community alike as amateur trifles published by a poet who inaccurately criticized the established Newtonian systems. Goethe received some acclaim for his ideas on light, clouds, and plants, and for coining the term and field of "morphology," but it was not until the twentieth century's increased understanding of the neurological processes of perception, quantum mechanics, and chaos and complexity theory that scholars began to...