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In the 17th century, Isaac Newton discovered that prisms could disassemble and reassemble white light, and described the phenomenon in his book Opticks. He was the first to use the word spectrum (Latin for "appearance" or "apparition") in this sense in print in 1671 in describing his experiments in optics.
Newton then suggested in Qu. 18 and Qu. 19 that light propagates through vacuum via a very subtle "Aethereal Medium", just like heat was thought to spread. Although the previous hypotheses describe wave-like aspects of light, Newton still believed in particle-like properties.
Generally, longer wavelengths (red) undergo a smaller deviation than shorter wavelengths (blue). The dispersion of white light into colors by a prism led Sir Isaac Newton to conclude that white light consisted of a mixture of different colors. Triangular prisms are the most common type of dispersive prism.
Isaac Newton first applied the word spectrum to describe the rainbow of colors that combine to form white light. During the early 1800s, Joseph von Fraunhofer conducted experiments with dispersive spectrometers that enabled spectroscopy to become a more precise and quantitative scientific technique.
During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that the multicoloured image produced by a prism, which he named a spectrum, could be recomposed into white light by a lens and a second prism. [78] Modern scholarship has revealed that Newton's analysis and resynthesis of white light owes a debt to corpuscular alchemy. [79]
Rather, the Opticks is a study of the nature of light and colour and the various phenomena of diffraction, which Newton called the "inflexion" of light. Newton sets forth in full his experiments, first reported to the Royal Society of London in 1672, [ 2 ] on dispersion , or the separation of light into a spectrum of its component colours.
Isaac Newton built his reflecting telescope as a proof for his theory that white light is composed of a spectrum of colours. [6] He had concluded that the lens of any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours (chromatic aberration). The telescope he constructed used mirrors as the objective which bypass that ...
Isaac Newton (1643–1727) investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a spectrum of colours, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the multicoloured spectrum into white light. He also showed that the coloured light does not change its properties by separating out a coloured ...