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Isaac Newton worked on optics throughout his research career, conducting various experiments and developing hypotheses to explain his results. [7] He dismissed Descartes' theory of light because he rejected Descartes’ understanding of space, which derived from it. [ 8 ]
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 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.
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 ...
Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27 [a]) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. [5] Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. [6]
Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others, described by A. Rupert Hall; [3] the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of the evolution ...
He and Isaac Newton could only envision light waves as being longitudinal, propagating like sound and other mechanical waves in fluids. However, longitudinal waves necessarily have only one form for a given propagation direction, rather than two polarizations like a transverse wave .
Taking this into account, Snell's Law can be used to predict how a prism will disperse light into a spectrum. [41] The discovery of this phenomenon when passing light through a prism is famously attributed to Isaac Newton. Some media have an index of refraction which varies gradually with position and, therefore, light rays in the medium are ...