Opticks: or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light
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Book Description
Isaac Newton can be seen as a Renaissance colossus, a polymath straddling his age with one foot confidently planted in the Enlightenment and the other still mired in the Middle Ages. A firm believer in reason and the ability of human beings to understand how the universe worked (”the inward frame of bodies is not yet known to us,” he writes in one place, with apparent confidence that eventually it would be), he also held some surprisingly reactionary ideas about God, and about how the truth of Holy Writ could be reconciled with Nature. A genius? Undoubtedly. The French philosophe Voltaire attended Newton’s funeral in 1727, later writing that “in a country where mortals are canonized, his discoveries might very well pass for miracles.”
It was in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that Isaac Newton’s earliest optical paper was published in 1672. The result of experiments arising from Newton’s attempt to solve the problem of chromatic aberration in telescopes (he had been grinding his own lenses for nearly a decade), he concluded that white light contained all colors and that different colors were refracted to different degrees. His effort yielded a valuable practical result still in use today: Having determined that a very long ratio of aperture to length would result in spyglass tubes of unwieldy size, he solved the problem by inventing the reflecting telescope, described in Book I of Opticks.
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