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Book

Newton's Opticks (1704)

Newton's book of prism experiments, written in English, that made white light a mixture of colors.

Published
London, 1704 (Latin edition 1706)
Language
English
Queries
16 in 1704; 31 by 1730

Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light was published by Isaac Newton in 1704, in English rather than scholarly Latin; a Latin edition followed in 1706. He had held it back until his rival Robert Hooke died in 1703. Unlike his mathematical Principia, it reads like a lab notebook: each claim is backed by an experiment a reader could repeat.

Book One holds the color theory. Prisms show that white light is a mixture of rays, each bent by its own amount and each with its own color. In the 'crucial experiment', a color picked out by one prism passes through a second unchanged: the prism doesn't create color, it sorts it. Newton names seven colors, matching the spectrum to a musical scale, and arranges them in a circle, an early color wheel that predicts what mixtures will look like.

He also makes a point philosophers still cite: “the Rays to speak properly are not coloured.” They only have a power to stir up a sensation of color in us (see is your red my red?). And he shows that red and violet light mixed make a purple found nowhere in the spectrum (colors that aren't in the rainbow).

The book ends with 'Queries', open questions about light, heat, gravity and matter that grew from 16 in 1704 to 31 by 1730. It overturned the Aristotelian idea that colors are light mixed with darkness, and a century later it provoked Goethe's Theory of Colours.

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