Opticks

Sunlight takes about seven minutes to travel from the Sun to us, Isaac Newton writes—and a ray of light, he insists, is more than a line in a diagram.

In Opticks, Newton turns to the behavior of light with a scientist’s caution: he will not explain its properties by guesswork, but will propose and test them by reason and experiment. With glass, water, prisms and lenses, he investigates why rays bend or return from a surface, and why some are more refrangible than others. The familiar beam becomes a puzzle of distinct kinds of light, each with properties to be measured. If white light is not simple, what will a prism reveal within it?

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