Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Isaac Newton loved asking how light works. In a dark room he let sunlight through a tiny hole and through a glass prism, and out came a rainbow of colors. That proved white light is really many colors mixed together. He did experiment after experiment and wrote them all down in this book. If you like testing things to see what is true, Newton is your kind of scientist.
Newton performed his first prism experiments in the 1660s, during the plague years when Cambridge closed and he worked at home. He published some results early and quarreled with critics, then waited decades before releasing the full account. Opticks appeared in 1704, written in English rather than Latin, and Newton kept revising and expanding it in later editions.
The book proceeds by experiment: prisms splitting and recombining light, thin films producing rings of color, and lenses and mirrors examined in detail. Newton argues that colors belong to the light itself, not to the glass, and he studies how rays bend and reflect. At the end come his famous Queries, questions about light, matter, and nature that point toward future research.
Opticks became the model of how to do experimental physics, clear, patient, and testable, and it shaped science for a century. Its picture of light as particles was later challenged by wave theories, yet the experiments remain exemplary. Readers curious about color, vision, or the birth of the laboratory method will find Newton a surprisingly companionable guide.
Isaac Newton published Opticks in 1704, late in his career, gathering decades of experiments with prisms, lenses, and colors into one English language masterpiece. He shows that white light is a mixture of colors, explains the rainbow, and asks bold questions about the nature of light itself. The book offers experimental science at its most careful and curious, written by the man who had already remade mechanics and mathematics.
Opticks is Newton's other masterpiece, and in some ways his more personal one. Published in English in 1704, when he was president of the Royal Society and master of the Mint, it gathers forty years of experiments on light and color, beginning with the prism trials of his plague year seclusion at Woolsthorpe. Where the Principia is mathematical and forbidding, Opticks is built to be repeated at a table.
It has lasted on the strength of that method. Experiment by experiment, Newton shows that white light is a mixture of rays of different colors, that the rainbow is a spectrum sorted by refraction, and that color is a property of light rather than a modification imposed by glass. The closing Queries, speculative questions about light, heat, and attraction, seeded research programs for generations and show Newton thinking aloud beyond his proofs.
A first reader can follow nearly all of it without mathematics, and can even repeat the central experiment with a prism on a sunny day. Read the first book straight through. The voice, precise and quietly confident, is half the pleasure.
Edition: Fourth edition, 1730. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 33504.
The first chapter
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Part of the ensuing Discourse about Light was written at the Desire of some Gentlemen of the Royal-Society, in the Year 1675, and then sent to their Secretary, and read at their Meetings, and the rest was added about twelve Years after to complete the Theory; except the third Book, and the last Proposition of the Second, which were since put together out of scatter'd Papers. To avoid being engaged in Disputes about these Matters, I have hitherto delayed the printing, and should still have delayed it, had not the Importunity of Friends prevailed upon me. If any other Papers writ on this Subject are got out of my Hands they are imperfect, and were perhaps written before I had tried all the Experiments here set down, and fully satisfied my self about the Laws of Refractions and Composition of Colours. I have here publish'd what I think proper to come abroad, wishing that it may not be translated into another Language without my Consent._
The Crowns of Colours, which sometimes appear about the Sun and Moon, I have endeavoured to give an Account of; but for want of sufficient Observations leave that Matter to be farther examined. The Subject of the Third Book I have also left imperfect, not having tried all the Experiments which I intended when I was about these Matters, nor repeated some of those which I did try, until I had satisfied my self about all their Circumstances. To communicate what I have tried, and leave the rest to others for farther Enquiry, is all my Design in publishing these Papers._
In a Letter written to Mr._ Leibnitz in the year 1679, and published by Dr._ Wallis, I mention'd a Method by which I had found some general Theorems about squaring Curvilinear Figures, or comparing them with the Conic Sections, or other the simplest Figures with which they may be compared. And some Years ago I lent out a Manuscript containing such Theorems, and having since met with some Things copied out of it, I have on this Occasion made it publick, prefixing to it an Introduction, and subjoining a Scholium concerning that Method. And I have joined with it another small Tract concerning the Curvilinear Figures of the Second Kind, which was also written many Years ago, and made known to some Friends, who have solicited the making it publick._
I. N._
April 1, 1704.
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In this Second Edition of these Opticks I have omitted the Mathematical Tracts publish'd at the End of the former Edition, as not belonging to the Subject. And at the End of the Third Book I have added some Questions. And to shew that I do not take Gravity for an essential Property of Bodies, I have added one Question concerning its Cause, chusing to propose it by way of a Question, because I am not yet satisfied about it for want of Experiments._
I. N._
July 16, 1717.
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This new Edition of Sir Isaac Newton's Opticks is carefully printed from the Third Edition, as it was corrected by the Author's own Hand, and left before his Death with the Bookseller. Since Sir Isaac's Lectiones Opticae, which he publickly read in the University of Cambridge in the Years 1669, 1670, and 1671, are lately printed, it has been thought proper to make at the bottom of the Pages several Citations from thence, where may be found the Demonstrations, which the Author omitted in these Opticks.
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Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1704. Author died 1727. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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