Newton, on Colour
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Outline

  • Intro to Color & Optics before Newton
  • Who was Newton?
  • The 1672 Letter
  • Debate
  • Sequel to 1704

    VISUALS
    1. rainbows & Fools Paradises
    2. thin films
    3. Aristotle's theory of color
    4. Renaissance painters & color
    5. Rubens' "Juno & Argus"
    6. demonstrating Aguilon's theory of color
    7. Rene Descartes
    8. lenses in spectacles (van Eyck, portrait of Canon van der Peale, 1436; Distillatio, 1570)
    9. Zaccahrias Jansen and his microscope
    10. Hans Lippershey and Galileo's telescope
    11. Willebrord Snell [glass image by Oleg Volk]
    12. Hooke's microscope and image [Micrographia]
    13. chromatic aberration

    14. Isaac Newton (1679)
    15. his birthplace in Woolsthrope
    16. Trinity College, Cambridge
    17. Newton's experimental set-up for studying optics w/ prisms
    18. his reflecting telescope
    19. prism: producing color or dividing white light? [Damon Hart-Davis]

      Newton at Cambridge
      optical lectures
      Newtonian universe? (1704 orrery)
      Biblical chronology manuscript [King's College Library, Cambridge in White (1997)]

      The 1672 Letter
    20. Newton on chromatic aberration
    21. central claim
    22. two inverted prisms [Dennis Sepper]
    23. solar angle [Dennis Sepper]
    24. semi-Cartesian hypothesis [Dennis Sepper]
    25. later experiment on the oblong image
    26. 'experimentum crucis'? [Dennis Sepper]
    27. number of colors?

      1672-1704
    28. the thin films
    29. Newton's rings
    30. ray diagram
    31. the color scale [1675]
    32. mixing colors with a "wheel"
    33. Newton, 1702 [portrait by Kneller]

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