The Role of the Naturalist

Tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future - Adam Rogers shows the expansive human quest for the understanding, creation and use of color. We meet our ancestors mashing charcoal in caves, Silk Road merchants competing for the best ceramics, and textile artists cracking the centuries-old mystery of how colors mix, before shooting to the modern era for high-stakes corporate espionage and the digital revolution that’s rewriting the rules of color forever. This journey has required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world. Adam Rogers is the author of Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern and Proof: The Science of Booze. He is a deputy editor at Wired, and was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and a writer covering science and technology for Newsweek.