In other words, Newton held that white light is composed of colours that can be considered primary a statement that he proved in what is now known as ‘The Crucial Experiment’, which incorporated the use of prisms to separate the white light and to isolate a given colour, as each colour has a unique angle of refraction. This paper was the first of many to outline Newton’s theory that white light is a “Heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays”, where ‘heterogeneous’ refers to something that is diverse in content, and ‘refrangible’ refers to matter that is able to be refracted. His theories regarding optics, however, were made public right at the start of his career with his first written work on optics being published just after his election to the Royal Society. 172.Most of Newton’s theories only became known later in his life and after the publication of the 'Principia'. Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) no. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991) no. The first edition of the Opticks ends with two mathematical treatises in Latin, written to establish his priority over Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the invention of the calculus. Nevertheless, Newton preferred the corpuscular theory of light, with which he is usually associated, because of its explanatory value for certain optical phenomena and because it a llowed him to link the action of gross bodies with the action of light.

His discovery of periodicity in Newton's rings, which would later prove to be so useful to Thomas Young, led Newton to postulate that periodicity was a fundamental property either of light waves or of waves associated with light. The book summarized Newton's discoveries and theories concerning light and color: the spectrum of the sunlight, the degrees of refraction associated with different colors, the color circle (the first in the history of color theory), the invention of the reflecting telescope the first workable theory of the rainbow, and experiments on what would later be called 'interference effects' in conjunction with Newton's rings. Unlike most of Newton's works, Opticks was originally published in English, with the Latin version following in 1706. Isaac Newton published Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light. Also Two Treatises of the Species and Magnitude of Curvilinear Figures in London in 1704.

Newtons opticks