In this extract from the new book Beautiful Experiments: An Illustrated History of Experimental Science, science writer Philip Ball explains how Isaac Newton transformed our understanding of light.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Newton Gravity, the putter brand formerly known as Sacks Parente, introduces a revamped line of five milled putters made of carbon steel and aircraft-grade aluminum. All ...

Great question, Desiree. Let me start with a story about the scientist Isaac Newton. About 350 years ago, he was thinking a lot about light, and what it is made of. He held a prism up to the light ...

One popular explanation in Isaac Newton's time was that the prism created the colors by somehow changing the white light into other forms. Newton's interpretation was different.

Twenty-odd years before Newton stated the three laws of motion, he conducted a simple, breakthrough prism experiment. He poked a hole through his window shade, allowing a single beam of light to ...

In the optical experiments that he described to the Royal Society in 1672, Isaac Newton showed that a prism would disperse sunlight into a spectrum, and identified what he deemed the seven basic ...

A GLASS prism, said to have been the property of Isaac Newton, is on exhibition in the British Museum, Medieval Collections Room, Bay XVI. It was presented in 1927 by the Rev. H. T. Inman of ...

Isaac Newton was the first to demonstrate through his famous prism experiments that color is intrinsic to light. As part of those experiments, he also divvied up the spectrum in his own ...

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, by the Julian calendar of the day, and on January 4, 1643, by today’s Gregorian calendar. His father, also named Isaac, died three months before ...

Nearly four centuries ago Isaac Newton demonstrated that a glass prism could separate white light into all the colors of a rainbow. Now a Switzerland-based team of electrical engineers has built a ...