That's a... surprisingly deep question. I'm actually a physicist by background first, so I got my start doing waaayyy too many calculations with blackbody and emissions spectra.

Then, back in 2010, when I was just getting into startups, I spent two weeks straight at Powell's in Portland reading through their graphic design section.

After that, I never got very far away from light or perception... AR/VR -> graphics -> silicon photonics -> physical AI (now).

I'm still very much learning, but if you like this stuff and want to learn more yourself there's a couple sources I can recommend:

- Interaction of Color, by Josef Albers. Amazing book, but you really want to get a physical copy.

- I really like this talk from SciPy 2015 to get a sense of how people work with and talk about color maps in practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU

- This is a really, really thorough (and beautifully illustrated) article on what color spaces are: https://www.makingsoftware.com/chapters/color-spaces-models-...

- And last, I wrote a very technical blog post a few years back, if you want to see some math on a bunch of this: https://www.usuallypragmatic.com/projects/Generating-Color-T...