#Isaac newton discoveries series

More importantly, it revealed the stream of colors as unchanged – proof that colors were not modifications of white light, but that white light is comprised of all components of the spectrum. The resulting panorama allowed Newton to calculate the angle of each refracted color.

He conducted an experiment in which he drilled a tiny hole in the shutter of his bedroom window, intercepted the ensuing light beam with a prism, and then placed a second prism in the path of those refracted beams. Newton also turned his attention to the study of optics, and the prevailing wisdom that every color on the spectrum was a mix of dark and white light. He analyzed color, light and the spectrum Isaac Newton dispersing light with a glass prism Photo: Apic/Getty Images

#Isaac newton discoveries series

The issue at hand was determining universal equations involving fluctuating quantities, an issue that had been tackled, on a limited scale, by the French mathematicians René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat.īy the end of 1666, Newton had effectively solved this problem with a series of papers on the rules of 'fluxions,' now known as calculus. READ MORE: How Isaac Newton Changed Our World Newton helped develop calculusįirst, he continued the work on mathematics that had engaged his mental acuities until being shut out of Trinity.

This period is now known as annus mirabilis – the 'year of wonders.' Along with being located a safe distance from the carriers of the horrific disease that was wiping out the population of the city, Woolsthorpe provided the sort of quiet, serene environment that allowed a mind like Newton's to journey, uninterrupted, to the farthest reaches of the imagination. As described in Gale Christianson's Isaac Newton, a few months after acquiring his undergraduate degree in the spring of that year, the 23-year-old retreated to his family farm of Woolsthorpe Manor, some 60 miles northwest of Cambridge. When the Great Plague of London ravaged through the British city beginning in 1665, Issac Newton was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge.