The science of color in Romanticism seems dominated by Goethe. But a different German scientist, Johann Wilhelm Ritter, proved that a Romantic worldview made a color-related discovery possible that–in contrast to Goethe’s–is still well respected among scientists today: the detection of ultraviolet rays. In 1800 British astronomer William Herschel found heat rays beyond the visible red (infrared) when measuring temperatures of the color spectrum but couldn’t identify anything equivalent beyond the violet. As a Romantic convinced of the polarity of the world, Ritter projected the refracted colors onto paper sensitized to light and was able to show that the corresponding invisible color on the opposite end was the chemically active Ultraviolet. The extension of the visible color spectrum in both directions was to change the understanding of colors and light fundamentally.