Jethalal S. Zaveri
Prof. Muni Mahendra Kumar
Sir C.V. Raman, the famous Indian scientist and a Nobel Laureate, has made an intensive research on the phenomenon of colour. His findings published in 'Current Science' as series of articles entitled 'The New Physiology of Vision' corroborate the Jain view that it is the internal structure of the material object, which is responsible for producing colour. He concludes thus:
"It follows that all aspects of vision including the perception of space and form, the perception of luminosity and the perception of colour, can only be understood in terms of the corpuscular concept of the nature of light". Again he clearly states - "Colour as seen in daylight is the sensation resulting from the synthesis by the eye of the whole spectrum of radiation falling upon the object and returned to the eye after scattering or diffusion by the material of which it is composed."
Thus we may conclude that according to Raman, the chromatic sensation (i.e. the perceived colour or Cp in our notation) depends upon the energy of light corpuscles reflected or transmitted by the object. That is, it is dependent on some peculiar property inherent in the material of the object and therefore, the quality possessed by the material of the object is the deciding factor in the perception of colour. It should be noted that the perceived colour (Cp) is not identical with Cp because Cp is a function of Co, L and S.
We may summarise the above discussion thus:
The difference in emission and absorption of light by different coloured surfaces is the effect of some innate quality in the material object and light acts merely as a medium for the perception of the colour and not for its existence.
From the above discussion we can get a fair idea of the characteristic quality called colour, which, according to the Jain view, is an inseparable innate property of all material objects.
