The colour of science

Last month, Lab News columnist and general science raconteur, Russ Swan wrote about the staggering lack of imagination from scientific equipment companies when it comes to their kit. In terms of colour, he noted, one can never really stray too far from the adjectives ‘bland’, ‘dismal’ and ‘dreary’ to describe the average laboratory’s complement of equipment. But surely, we started to think, we can’t leave science itself lingering in such a swathe of dullness? So then, just what colour can be classed as representative of science? And to those of you who say: “What an utterly pointless exercise”, we would remind you that we are the Science Lite desk – pointless exercises are our stock-in-trade. With that, we’d like to posit the following: Science is blue. Let us explain – science seems to be synonymous with the colour blue. Take for example the masthead of this very magazine – ever since we became a full colour publication, Laboratory News has been blue (albeit with a little white and even yellow thrown in on occasion). And it’s not just the furniture of the magazine – have a glance through our pages and you’ll notice that the majority of the adverts are also rooted in blue. And we’re not the only ones – Chemistry World, WIRED and New Scientist all use varying shades of blue as their corporate colour on their websites. And so do the European Space Agency, NASA, and many other scientific companies and institutions – what is it about blue that makes it so synonymous with science? In short – we don’t know. But we do know this – blue has a rather distinguished and eventful history. Firstly, blue is one of the constituents of visible light, residing at 450-495nm in the electromagnetic spectrum. This means it has a relatively short wavelength and is scattered easily by oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere. This causes more blue light to reach our eyes – hence the reason the sky is blue. The sea is blue for the same reason – water molecules absorb more light in the red region of the spectrum, and scatters the blue, meaning the sea looks that lovely dreamy blue. And then we realised that the uniforms of the Navy and Air Force are blue – surely it’s not a coincidence that they ended up being the colour of the sea and sky. But getting them that colour wasn’t always easy as blue dyes and pigments were once notoriously difficult to make. Traditionally, blue pigments were made by crushing minerals like lapis lazui and azurite – Cu₃(CO₂)₃(OH)₂ – and mixing them with a binding agent, while natural dyes like woad and true indigo were used to colour cloth. As with many things, the Egyptians had this blue problem nailed and made the first synthetic blue around 2500 BC using it to dye cloths to wrap mummies – believing it would protect the dead against evil. They mixed sand, copper and natron (a kind of soda ash) before heating to produce a blue dye, which they used to colour cloth, but the exact formula has since been lost. But over the years, blue lost its association with nobility and became the colour of the poor, who had low quality clothes coloured with woad, a plant common in Europe. By the 1220s, blue had become popular again as French King Louis IX regularly dressed in the colour, but it wasn’t the rich, dark blue we might see today – it was a much more pastel-like hue. It wasn’t until the 1500s when true indigo – which has the same chemical formula as woad but is much more concentrated – began to be exported from India that the rich dark blues we see today became popular. Quite a journey then – blue has risen and fallen from grace and now it seems to have enveloped science. Just take a look around your lab: how often do you see blue in company logos, on the mastheads of magazines, and on the equipment? So is blue is the universally accepted colour of science? We think it is – but maybe you disagree. If so, what colour would you say science is?