Ng started gathering slides that would cover the wavelengths of light, the biology of the human eye—the basics—“Blah, blah, blah,” he said. Eyes are constantly moving; cone cells are extremely small; how color is translated from the millions of cone cells to the mind remains pretty mysterious; this was awesome work. To understand what Ng had in mind requires knowing a bit of the blah, blah, blah of color vision. L cone cells respond to the relatively longer wavelengths of visible light, M cone cells to the medium wavelengths, and S cone cells to the shorter ones. “I get a lot of e-mails suggesting what I should research,” Roorda told me, of the time it took him to respond.