Question

describe Newton's experiment to show the prism by itself produces no colour


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Answer 1

Answer:

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) exerted a profound influence on many aspects of science, notably on optics and dynamics, through his great mastery of precise experiments, but he was also a celebrated writer on religion, scientific method and the philosophy of science. He was born at the Christmas following the death of Galileo and would later declare his indebtedness to that Italian and to the Pole, Copernicus.

His investigations into optics commenced in 1666 at the end of an annus mirabilis when, at home in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire due to the bubonic plague which was raging in Cambridge, he investigated gravity, calculus and the laws of motion. He determined to ‘try therewith the celebrated Phaenomena of Colour’. It had been thought previously that colour was created by the mixing of light and darkness. Newton noted, however, that the blended print on the white page of a book appears grey, not coloured, when viewed from a distance. His experiments in bending light through prisms led, eventually, to the revolutionary discovery of the existence in white light of a mixture of distinct coloured rays, distinguishable when refracted in a prism. In his first experiment he projected the light via a round hole in his shutters.  

‘In a very dark Chamber, at a round hole, about one third Part of an Inch broad, made in the Shut of a Window, I placed a Glass Prism’. See Opticks, Prop. II, Theor. II Exper. 3. Newton began by projecting the light onto a wall before fixing the posture of the prism and projecting the light onto a white sheet of paper.

This produced a stretched image of the sun, which was mainly white, but featured a blue upper edge and red lower edge. In his second experiment he projected the light through a narrow slit in the shutters, thereby achieving the now familiar multi-coloured band. A painting in the BOA Museum shows Newton allowing light, via a prism, to reveal the spectrum on a piece of white card resting on a chair.

Explanation: