Schrödinger's Color Geometry Completed: Why Non-Riemannian Paths Reveal Perception's Intrinsic Structure

A Los Alamos team led by Roxana Bujack has supplied the missing mathematical closure to Erwin Schrödinger's 1920s Riemannian model of color space by defining the neutral gray axis solely through the geometry of perceived color distances. Presented at the 2026 Eurographics Conference on Visualization rather than in a peer-reviewed journal, the work draws on the group's earlier 2022 PNAS paper that first demonstrated color perception deviates from strict Riemannian curvature. Unlike traditional experiments, this advance relies on purely mathematical construction with no human subject sample size or empirical testing reported, limiting claims to formal consistency within the model. The correction for the Bezold-Brücke hue shift via shortest-path geodesics in non-Riemannian space, plus accounting for diminishing perceptual returns, exposes a deeper pattern: sensory metrics in vision parallel the shift from classical to quantum descriptions where observer-dependent distances replace flat Euclidean assumptions. Mainstream coverage overlooked how this framework could unify color science with broader perceptual physics, including auditory or tactile spaces that also exhibit non-metric effects. By showing hue, saturation, and lightness emerge directly from the metric without cultural overlays, the research strengthens the case that fundamental perceptual structures predate learning, a point Schrödinger himself could not fully formalize. Limitations remain: the model assumes three cone types and has yet to be validated against large-scale psychophysical datasets or extended to anomalous color vision.