"Recommended to all scientists." — Journal of Royal Naval Scientific Service
Journal of Royal Naval Scientific Service
"The publishers do us a service by issuing this reprint." — The Institute of Physics
"An underpinning for the entire edifice of physics." — Scientific American
Scientific American
A comprehensive survey of eighteenth-century knowledge about all aspects of light, OpticksOpticks also offers countless scientific insights by its distinguished author. One of the most readable of all the great classics of physical science, this volume will impress readers with its surprisingly modern perspectives.
In language that lay readers can easily follow, Sir Isaac Newton describes his famous experiments with spectroscopy and colors, lenses, and the reflection and diffraction of light. Book I contains his fundamental experiments with the spectrum, Book II deals with the ring phenomena, and Book III covers diffraction. The work concludes with "Queries" — speculations concerning light and gravitation. OpticksOpticks is introduced with a Foreword by Albert Einstein.
Sir Isaac Newton was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who is considered one of the most influential people in human history.
Newton remains influential to scientists, as demonstrated by a 2005 survey of scientists in Britain's Royal Society asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Albert Einstein. Newton was deemed the more influential.[8]
Newton also wrote on Judaeo-Christian prophecy, whose decipherment was essential, he thought, to the understanding of God. His book on the subject, which was reprinted well into the Victorian Age, represented lifelong study. Its message was that Christianity went astray in the 4th century AD, when the first Council of Nicaea propounded erroneous doctrines of the nature of Christ. The full extent of Newton's unorthodoxy was recognized only in the present century: but although a critic of accepted Trinitarian dogmas and the Council of Nicaea, he possessed a deep religious sense, venerated the Bible and accepted its account of creation. In late editions of his scientific works he expressed a strong sense of God's providential role in nature.
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