- 2696 - NEWTON - Isaac was quarantined ? Thanks to the “Newton Project“, we can see the notes that Newton took during his time in isolation in 1665. The section titled “On Colours” consists of 64 experiments and observations about light.
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------------------------------ 2696 - NEWTON - Isaac was quarantined ?
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- You don’t need to make a great discovery in quarantine , but Isaac did. Isaac Newton made some of his most important physics discoveries while in quarantine during the bubonic plague in the 1660s.
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- This comes from my own self-isolation during the COVID-19 crisis. So you can use this time in quarantine to unlock your creative / intellectual potential too!
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- Isaac did not fall sick himself, or have to tend to sick loved ones. Also, he likely had others taking care of things like cooking and cleaning, being a well-off on a farm 1665.
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- Here is some of the physics he discovered while isolating. I hope this is some inspiration for you to do the same.
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- Besides seeing apples fall from the tree and discovering gravity and inventing calculus, Newton spent a lot of time in isolation playing with prisms. These formed the basis of his first paper on optics, and later his book “Opticks“, on the fundamental nature of light.
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- As astronomy is based entirely on observing light (with the very recent exception of gravitational waves), Newton even coined the word “spectrum.”
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- The “Newton Project“, published the notes that Newton took during his time in isolation. The section titled “On Colours” consists of 64 experiments and observations about light.
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- In the 1600s, there was no clear picture of light and color. People had observed that prisms, angled pieces of glass, turned white light into a colorful beam. One of the going hypotheses was that the prism “corrupted” the white light and produced colors.
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- Newton’s first great innovation was simply to shine the colorful light onto a sheet a bit farther from the prism. In his first prism experiment in “Of Colours“, he held the prism near a hole in the wall, and let the sunlight pass through the prism and land on a sheet of paper.
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- He noted that “The colours should have been in a round circle were all the rays alike refracted,” but instead he observed an oblong shape that appeared red on one end and blue on the other. This showed that prisms not only create colors but separate them from each other, and that refraction is directly related to the color of the light.
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- Newton took this a step farther in one of the final prism experiments of the notebook. He lined up three prisms and let light pass through all of them onto a wall . On the edges, he observed pure red and pure blue light. However, in between these, the wall shone white. This meant that the colours “blended together” into white, so the light was not permanently corrupted by the prisms; rather, the colored light from different prisms could be recombined into white light.
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- These experiments were important precursors to what is known as “Newton’s Experimentum Crucis“, or crucial experiment. This was outlined in his first publication, “A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton “, containing his “New Theory about Light and Colors” in Philosophical Transactions in 1671/1672.
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- In the experiment, Newton let sunlight pass through a hole in the wall. He placed a prism in front of the beam, and then blocked all but a small amount of the light that passed through this prism with a board . After letting this light beam spread out over 12 feet, he again only let a small amount of light through board , which he passed through a second prism.
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- Newton allows only the lower part of the initial beam, the redder part of the spectrum, to pass through the hole. It ends up at a point on the far wall. Newton then rotates prism . This shifted the part of the beam that fell on the hole to be the bluer part, so now blue light passes through hole onto prism.
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- The final beam now hit a point ! The initial color of light clearly determined the final refraction angle, independently of the thickness of the prisms, and of the angle of incidence. Refraction must be due to the properties of light itself.
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- In Newton’s words, “Light consists of Rays differently refrangible.” He goes on to state that this is “ not by any virtue of the glass, or other external cause, but from a predisposition, which every particular Ray hath to suffer a particular degree of Refraction.”
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- This experiment along with Newton’s related work, revolutionized our understanding of light, all thanks to a toy prism he bought at a local fair.
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- Newton’s notes on color in quarantine end with him staring at the sun and pressing a blunt needle against the back of his eye to try to understand vision. What is this with astrophysicists and self-inflicted wounds while self-isolating?
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- So really, no pressure on the be-a-genius-in-quarantine. Just thought you should have a goal.
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---------------------- See other reviews about light:
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- 2684 - LIGHT - keeps getting stranger? We have wave- particle duality, photon entanglement and anti-matter, matter asymmetry as three courses in our college of future study. Entanglement bothers me the most. My imagination can wade through the other two, but not that one. It is just too weird for me to comprehend. Entanglement in the brain? Here is a Review ror you to try it.
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- This Review lists ten more Reviews about light, all available upon request.:
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- April 4, 2020 2696
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