I just can't get this color business straight in my head.

A few years ago, I wrote a POV-Ray scene with clear ocean water.  I found a
graph of the spectral absorption of water, and did some numerical integration to
shoehorn it into an RGB vector.  The image turned out well, but then I realized
that I'd neglected something (I can't remember what) concerning sRGB.  But each
subsequent attempt to improve the accuracy of my water made it less
realistic-looking.

Then I turned my attention to the Cornell box.  Cornell publishes the spectral
reflectivity curves of its materials, and it occurred to me that there ought to
be a way to map a spectral curve to sRGB.  But I couldn't figure out how to make
a double peak at 549.1 and 611.3 nm look the same as a single peak at 570.1 nm.

I managed to find a Web site that attempted, in the author's judgment, the
"best" spectrum that could be displayed on a computer monitor.  He started out
by converting CIE coordinates to sRGB.  I figured that learning about the CIE
color space might be worthwhile.

I've been seeing this CIE chromacity diagram since I was 13 years old, but I
don't understand it.  (I thought I understood it when I was 13, but I can't
remember what it was that I understood.  It obviously wasn't the math.)

I went to CIE's Web site.  Way out of my league.

I looked up CIE 1931 color space on Wikipedia.  I got lost in the section on
color matching functions.  I kept staring and staring and staring at what's
written there, and I can't figure out what the heck it's saying.

Is there a gentle introduction to color spaces out there?

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