![]() Newton performed his experiments in 1666 and announced them shortly thereafter, subscribing to the corpuscular (or particulate) theory of light. He used a second prism to recombine the rainbow spectrum back into a beam of white light this showed that white light must be a combination of colors, not the other way around. Newton, however, doubted this assumption. It had been generally accepted that white was a single color, and that a prism could somehow combine white light with others to form a multicolored mixture. The renowned English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton was intrigued by the so-called "phenomenon of colors"-the ability of a prism to produce colors from white light. By the mid-1600s, enough was known about the behavior of light to allow for the formulation of a wide range of theories. These laws were further refined by Willebrord Snel, whose name is most often associated with the equations for determining the refraction of light. In the early 1600s, the refracting telescope was perfected by Galileo and Johannes Kepler, providing a reliable example of the laws of refraction. More productive research into the behavior of light was sparked by the new class of realistic painters, who strove to better understand perspective and shading by studying light and its properties. The English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) contended that light was a disturbance in an invisible medium which could be detected by the eye subsequently, color was caused by objects "staining" the light as it passed. He also studied mirrors and lenses and further refined the laws of reflection and refraction.īy the twelfth century, scientists felt they had solved the riddles of light and color. Experimenting around the year 1000, he showed that light comes from a source (the Sun) and reflects from an object to the eyes, thus allowing the object to be seen. The next contributor to the embryonic science of optics was the Arab mathematician and physicist Alhazen (965-1039), who is sometimes called the greatest scientist of the Middle Ages. ![]() In reflection, they learned that the angles of incidence and reflection were approximately equal in refraction, they saw that a beam of light would bend as it entered a denser medium (such as water or glass) and bend back the same amount as it exited. Despite this erroneous hypothesis, the Greeks were able to successfully study the phenomena of reflection and refraction and derive the laws governing them. However, they believed that vision worked by intromission-that is, that light rays originated at the eye and traveled to the object being seen. D.), they came to recognize that light traveled in a straight line. Led by the scientists Euclid and Hero (first century A. The Greeks were the first to theorize about the nature of light.
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