He performed a seemingly endless series of experiments to prove his theories. Some even believed that the colors of the rainbow were formed by rainwater that colored the sky’s rays. He began working on his studies of light and color even before creating the reflecting telescope, although he presented much of his evidence several years later, in his 1704 book, Opticks.īefore Newton, scientists primarily adhered to ancient theories on color, including those of Aristotle, who believed that all colors came from lightness (white) and darkness (black). The next time you look up at a rainbow in the sky, you can thank Newton for helping us first understand and identify its seven colors. Newton helped develop spectral analysisĪ drawing of Sir Isaac Newton dispersing light with a glass prism. Newton’s simple telescope design is still used today, by both backyard astronomers and NASA scientists. In fact, his first model, which he built in 1668 and donated to England’s Royal Society, was just six inches long (some 10 times smaller than other telescopes of the era), but could magnify objects by 40x. Newton’s new “reflecting telescope” was more powerful than previous versions, and because he used the small mirror to bounce the image to the eye, he could build a much smaller, more practical telescope. He replaced the refracting lenses with mirrored ones, including a large, concave mirror to show the primary image and a smaller, flat, reflecting one, to display that image to the eye. This caused “chromatic aberrations,” or fuzzy, out-of-focus areas around objects being viewed through the telescope.Īfter much tinkering and testing, including grinding his own lenses, Newton found a solution. Known as refracting telescopes, they used glass lenses that changed the direction of different colors at different angles. Photo: Getty Imagesīefore Newton, standard telescopes provided magnification, but with drawbacks. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and his monument stands by the choir screen, near his tomb.Sir Isaac Newton and his telescope. Whether his mind was truly able to align religion and science, no-one knows for sure. But his strong beliefs stemmed from his investigation of the natural world. He believed in a monotheistic God, and spent many hours trying to glean hidden messages from the Holy Bible. Aside from his scientific works, he wrote numerous theological papers, which dealt with the literal translation of the Bible. A history of the Bible: who wrote it and when?ĭespite being a scientific revolutionary, Newton was devoutly religious.This was the birth of a wave of newly enlightened thinkers.īy Newton’s time, religion was still a big part of life, but scientists were trying to understand how God fitted into the picture – alongside their research. In the 14th and 15th centuries, a group of so-called ‘humanists’ was formed in France and Italy – they were not opposed to the Church, merely intent on worshipping God away from the restraints of priests. Newton the politicianĭuring the Middle Ages, the Church was incredibly powerful, keeping the aristocracy under their thumb. This Scientific Revolution was truly an era of scientific enlightenment – perfectly summed up by the Royal Society’s motto: ‘Nullius in verba’, which basically means ‘take nobody’s word for it. Galileo Galilei worked out that objects of different mass fall at the same speed, and he improved the telescope, which led to his many astronomical discoveries – such as spotting mountains and valleys on the surface of the Moon, and discovering the four largest moons of the planet Jupiter.Īnd, by Newton’s time, when once people believed that the world was composed of four qualities (Empedocles’ earth, water, air and fire), scientists now recognised that it was made of atoms, or ‘corpuscles’ (small material bodies). Elsewhere in Europe, scientists carried out various experiments and came up with ingenious inventions. Most historians claim this Scientific Revolution was kick-started by mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), who came up with his heliocentric view that the Sun is at the centre of our Solar System, and not Earth. No longer did people simply theorise how the world worked, but they used individual experience and scientific experimentation to gain actual knowledge. What and when was the Scientific Revolution?įrom around the 15th to the end of the 17th centuries, developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry transformed society’s view of the world around us.
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