Light

Click on this image to open a larger version. From the Royal Society archive.

Isaac Newton’s first letters to the Royal Society concerned his work on light and optics, topics he had been pursuing since the 1660s. In his darkened room at Cambridge in 1666, Newton passed a narrow beam of light through a prism and observed the diverging spectrum. By 1672, the date of this letter, he not only relayed his “New theory of light and colours” to the Royal Society, overturning the centuries-held notion of the purity of white light, but also communicated his invention of the reflecting telescope, a revolution in astronomy.