What is simultaneous contrast and how does it work?
Perhaps your best bet is reading Michel-Eugene Chevreul ‘s original treaties of 1839 De la loi du contraste simultane des couleurs. I have not read it my self but it is the seminal work in color theory. Chevreul, if I remember correctly, was a chemist brought in by a French industrialist to analyze why a tight weave of red and green fiber had turned out to give a dark gray color effect. He determined on an empirical rather than theoretical basis that so-called complementary colors mixed below the eye’s ability to resolve will blend toward chromatic neutrality while is sufficiently large in are to be resolved will have the effect of augmenting each others chromatic intensity. Since then, biological researchers have determined that there are 6 million color receptors (cones) in the retina of the eye and only 400,000 optical nerves communicating color experience from the eye and apparently there is a great deal of signal processing taking place in the retina before signals are passed ont
