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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 ]
The major significance of Newton's work is that it overturned the dogma, attributed to Aristotle or Theophrastus and accepted by scholars in Newton's time, that "pure" light (such as the light attributed to the Sun) is fundamentally white or colourless, and is altered into color by mixture with darkness caused by interactions with matter ...
Newton's corpuscular theory of light was gradually succeeded by the wave theory. It was not until the 19th century that the quantitative measurement of dispersed light was recognized and standardized. As with many subsequent spectroscopy experiments, Newton's sources of white light included flames and stars, including the Sun.
Sir Isaac Newton (/ ˈ nj uː t ən /; 4 January [O.S. 25 December] 1643 – 31 March [O.S. 20 March] 1727) [a] was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author. [5] Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. [6]
Newton 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 beam and shining it on ...
Isaac Newton suggests the existence of an aether in the Third Book of Opticks (1st ed. 1704; 2nd ed. 1718): "Doth not this aethereal medium in passing out of water, glass, crystal, and other compact and dense bodies in empty spaces, grow denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the rays of light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve lines? ...
1672: Sir Isaac Newton: discovers that white light is a mixture of distinct coloured rays (the spectrum). 1673: Christiaan Huygens: first study of oscillating system and design of pendulum clocks; 1675: Leibniz, Newton: infinitesimal calculus. 1675: Anton van Leeuwenhoek: observes microorganisms using a refined simple microscope.
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 ...