Opticks
Notebook
Isaac Newton's Opticks (first edition 1704; this is the fourth, of 1730) is, with the Principia, one of the two pillars of his scientific achievement and a masterpiece of experimental science. Written in plain English rather than the geometry of the Principia, it reports his experiments with prisms and lenses to establish that white light is a mixture of rays of different colours and refrangibility, and develops his theories of colour, reflection, refraction, and the 'fits' of light. The book closes with the famous Queries, speculative questions that shaped physics and natural philosophy for a century.
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