Digital Color Management: Encoding Solutions, 2nd Edition

17

A Unified Paradigm: Basic Properties

If the hope of unification should prove well founded, how great and mighty and sublime...

Michael Faraday

At the time we were wrestling with the problems resulting from the use of three different color-management paradigms within the color-imaging industry, we both happened to be reading a book entitled Hyperspace. In that book, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku describes a problem that scientists puzzled over for decades: why do the fundamental forces of the universe—gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces—require markedly different mathematical descriptions?

Kaku explains that these apparent differences appear only because the basic paradigms used in their description are too limited. He shows that if all the fundamental forces are seen according to a larger unified paradigm—as vibrations in higher-dimensional spaces—their field equations suddenly unite in what he describes as an “elegant and astonishingly simple form.”

Now, developing a color-management system is hardly the equivalent of trying to explain the workings of the entire universe (although there are times when we are not sure which would be easier). Nevertheless, there are parallels, and there are lessons that can be learned from the search for a unified field theory.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that, historically, when true understanding is reached, the results exhibit unity, simplicity, beauty, and elegance. For example, the eight Maxwell ...