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Newton's Telescope
From: Science Museum
| By:
Nicholas Wyatt |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Although Newton is arguably the most important scientist in history, the massive breadth and depth of his interests are often forgotten. He was not only central in understanding forces and gravity, but became crucial to advances in calculus and geometry. Nicholas Wyatt of the Science Museum looks at Newton's contributions in telescope design, through his knowledge of reflected and refracted light. |
  ir Isaac Newton is the most famous and influential scientist ever to have lived. His discoveries and published works has a profound influence on scientific thought, laying the foundations of modern physics. |
Newton studied at Cambridge University where he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the age of 26 in 1669. He had already started to investigate gravitation in 1665, inspired, according to legend, by seeing an apple fall from a tree.  By careful experiment and observation he eventually formulated three standard laws of motion and the universal law of gravitation. He described these laws in 1687 in his great work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, commonly known as Principia. Its publication was partly financed by his friend Edmond Halley. Newton also demonstrated that scientific principles could be commonly applied, and he defined the nature of mass, weight, force, inertia and acceleration. Between 1679 and 1684 he studied the orbits of the Moon and the planets and found they could be explained using his theory of gravity. Newton's deep understanding of mathematics was crucial to the formulation of these theories. He also made significant advances in calculus, algebra, number theory and geometry. |
 The properties of light were also explored by Newton. By refracting light through a prism he found that white light was dispersed into its constituent colours. If one colour was selected and refracted through a second prism, no further colours were introduced.  This showed that colours were a property of light and not the prism. He noted that each colour refracted differently. He concluded that it was impossible to focus an image distinctly using a single lens, since the constituent colours would focus at slightly different points. He then built the world's first reflecting telescope, using a concave mirror which focused the light without any chromatic aberration. In 1704 he summed up these and other researches in his great work, Opticks. |
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