Opticks

Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions as well as Colours of Light is a book by English natural philosopher Isaac Newton that was published in English in 1704 a scholarly Latin translation appeared in 1706. The book analyzes the fundamental race of light by means of the refraction of light with prisms & lenses, the diffraction of light by closely spaced sheets of glass, and the behaviour of color mixtures with spectral lights or pigment powders. Opticks was Newton'smajor book on physical science and this is the considered one of the three major workings on optics during the Scientific Revolution alongside Kepler's Astronomiae Pars Optica and Huygens' Traité de la Lumière. Newton's work did not appear on the tag page of the first edition of Opticks.

Overview

The publication of Opticks represented a major contribution to science, different from but in some ways rivalling the Principia. Opticks is largely a record of experiments and the deductions exposed from them, covering a wide range of topics in what was later to be requested as physical optics. That is, this make-up is not a geometric discussion of catoptrics or dioptrics, the traditional subjects of reflection of light by mirrors of different shapes and the exploration of how light is "bent" as it passes from one medium, such(a) as air, into another, such as water or glass. Rather, the Opticks is a discussing of the quality of light and colour and the various phenomena of diffraction, which Newton called the "inflexion" of light.

In this book Newton sets forth in full his experiments, first reported to the Royal Society of London in 1672, on dispersion, or the separation of light into a spectrum of its part colours. He demonstrates how the sorting of color arises from selective absorption, reflection, or transmission of the various part parts of the incident light.

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 showed just the opposite was true: light is composed of different spectral hues he describes seven — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, and any colours, including white, are formed by various mixtures of these hues. He demonstrates that color arises from a physical property of light — regarded and spoke separately. hue is refracted at a characteristic angle by a prism or lens — but he clearly states that color is a sensation within the mind and not an inherent property of the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object objects or of light itself. For example, he demonstrates that a red violet magenta color can be mixed by overlapping the red and violet ends of two spectra, although this color does notin the spectrum and therefore is not a "color of light". By connecting the red and violet ends of the spectrum, he organised all colours as a color circle that both quantitatively predicts color mixtures and qualitatively describes the perceived similarity among hues.

Newton's contribution to prismatic dispersion was the first to profile multiple-prism arrays. Multiple-prism configurations, as beam expanders, became central to the design of the tunable laser more than 275 years later and set the stage for the coding of the multiple-prism dispersion theory.