THE END OF THE RAINBOW
The story of the Eskimos having a large number of words for the colors of snow probably started in 1911 when social anthropologist Franz Boas suggested they had four word roots for snow. (Boas, The Handbook of North American Indians.) This was picked up in 1940 in an MIT journal that future generations of linguists used freely: “We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven snow, flying snow— whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow.” (Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality.)
This finding was announced in January 2002. Three months later Johns Hopkins University made a second and slightly embarrassed announcement that the “color of the universe” was not actually turquoise but beige, due to a computer bug. “It’s our fault for not taking the color science seriously enough,” admitted assistant professor of astronomy Karl Glazebrook who had co-authored the study. He added that the discovery was actually just meant to be an amusing footnote to a large-scale survey of the spectrum of light emitted by 200,000 galaxies, but “the original press story blew up beyond our wildest expectations.” It referred to a mathematical calculation of what you would see if you had the universe in a box, and could see all the light at once. The newly calculated color, described more formally as III E Gamma, looks like off-white house paint. However, Glazebrook’s favorite tag is “cosmic latte.”
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