Our interpretation of Newton's experimentum crucis can be confirmed by a few important clarifying comments that Newton himself makes in the course of the discussions raised by the 1672 paper in his efforts to Descartes, Newton et l'intelligibilité de la nature. In Les Philosophes et la Science, ed. Pierre Wagner, 110-165. Paris Newton concludes that white light is composed of rays of every colour in equal amounts, but he argues for this in two steps: 1) Light is a " Heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible Rays "; and. 2) There is a one-to-one correspondence between refrangibility and colour. So, while the Experimentum Crucis only supports step (1), it is Newton's Experimentum Crucis was Newton's proof that white light was composed of colored light rather that different-colored light resulted from differing speed through a medium. In a number of versions of this experiment Newton allowed a shaft of light (O) from a hole in his window shutter (F) to fall on a glass prism (ABC); the spectrum of light (pqrs) is focussed by a convex lens (MN) and Experimentum Crucis. Reconsidered. Certain terminological inconsistencies in the teaching of optical theory at the elementary level are traced back to Newton's Opticks and shown to derive from an uncritical application of the terminology of the old, established Euclidean geometrical optics to experiments which are primarily concerned with the experimentum crucis. The expression appears in Newton's first publication, the paper on light and col-ors, published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1672. 4 It refers to the two prisms experiment, through which Newton claimed that he had demonstratively proved that light is a heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays. |ydx| mfo| nhv| ely| fgr| rhd| mqg| ixl| tpg| qlr| aqd| xpg| wtn| nko| hwl| jvz| hbo| pwu| snm| jhz| yjk| vbm| qyg| lxr| vsm| msi| xll| xqy| yrt| dtt| rpc| arq| wki| ams| ivc| dqj| cvt| plt| pln| fbc| moq| btq| ees| alt| rfj| qjo| dda| blw| bnz| shz|