It's weird that his color theory is such a minor thing in the article: I've recently read his "Conversations with Eckermann" (highly recommended: a long book of

It's weird that his color theory is such a minor thing in the article: I've recently read his "Conversations with Eckermann" (highly recommended: a long book of notes from Eckermann where he summarizes, well, myriad talks with Goethe. It's public domain.), you'll see that Goethe was convinced that his color theory was the major work of his life. He was quite bitter about the establishment rejecting his work (not Newton himself as he died 20 years before Goethe's birth) and couldn't let it go. >»Auf alles, was ich als Poet geleistet habe,« pflegte er wiederholt zu sagen, »bilde ich mir gar nichts ein. Es haben treffliche Dichter mit mir gelebt, es lebten noch trefflichere vor mir, und es werden ihrer nach mir sein. Daß ich aber in meinem Jahrhundert in der schwierigen Wissenschaft der Farbenlehre der einzige bin, der das Rechte weiß, darauf tue ich mir etwas zugute, und ich habe daher ein Bewußtsein der Superiorität über viele.« (my translation: I don't pride myself on anything I've done as a poet, there have been good poets alive with me, even better ones before me, and will be alive after me, but I'm proud to be the only one in this century who knows what's correct in the hard/difficult science of color theory, and therefore I feel superior to many) He wrote several books about the theory and kept on researching it, roughly summarized according to him colors came into being by a mixture of light and shadow. But he was quite blind about the failings of his theory - in another biography of Goethe (Safranski's) it even says that someone gifted him a prism which invalidates his theory as there's no shadow needed to make a rainbow, he just refused to use it.