Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, author of Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther, considered his scientific work as important as his poetry. He identified the intermaxillary bone in humans, wrote The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and a long Theory of Colours (1810) that opposed Newton. Physicists rejected the colour theory, though painters and psychologists of perception found it useful, an example of how differently the two worlds judged him.