Newton and the Colors

Isaac Newton, curious to find out why such an event occurred, took a fully polished prism and placed it in front of a hole he had made in his bedroom window. With this feat, he realized that the white light, coming from the Sun, was dispersed in colored beams and to this set of colors he called spectrum .. Newton was not in favor of the idea that this color appeared due to impurities existing in the prism. So he performed a new experiment where he let only one color pass through a second prism. With that, he verified that it did not add anything to the beam of light that fell on him. In this way, the physicist hypothesized that light was not pure, but formed by mixing or superimposing all the colors of the spectrum, and also concluded that light decomposes because of the refraction it undergoes when passing from one medium to another. another with different refractive indices.

In addition to studying the scattering of light, Newton theorized about the colors of bodies. According to him “the colors of all bodies are due simply to the fact that they reflect the light of a certain color in greater quantity than others .” This theory met with great opposition in the scientific community, a fact that led Isaac Newton to publish his works on optics only many years later.