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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.
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 ...
The publication of the law has become known as the "first great unification", as it marked the unification of the previously described phenomena of gravity on Earth with known astronomical behaviors. [1] [2] [3] This is a general physical law derived from empirical observations by what Isaac Newton called inductive reasoning. [4]
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.
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? ...
Newton wondered whether light, in the form of corpuscles, would be bent due to gravity. The Newtonian prediction for light deflection refers to the amount of deflection a corpuscle would feel under the effect of gravity, and therefore one should read "Newtonian" in this context as the referring to the following calculations and not a belief ...