The arrangement of colors in Newton's color circle suggests that it was derived from paint mixtures, not light mixtures. If this is true, we are led to conclude that what Newton called indigo represents violet in modern terminology, and what he called violet represents purple. The author hypothesizes that Newton saw seven reasonably distinct colors in the artist's paint mixture color circle (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and purple) and therefore assumed he could also see seven distinct colors in his crude spectral projections.
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