Newton discovered that colors arose from the separation rather
than a modification of white light, that is natural sunlight. He
did this using a prism to dissect the white light into its
spectrum of constituent colors and then using a prism and lens to
recombine the colors to reconstitute white light. The spectrum was
the same as that of a rainbow. He determined the angle of
refraction of each color by beaming white light through a prism,
and then through a hole in a board which isolated one color, to
another prism. When he discovered that all colors reflect from a
mirror at the same angle, he invented and built the reflecting
telescope, which used a parabolic concave mirror and a flat mirror
instead of a convex lens, thereby eliminating the distortions and
rainbow coloring around the edges that resulted from the
refraction of different colors at different angles. He deemed a
ray of light to consist of a rapidly moving stream of atomic
particles, rather than Robert Hooke's pulses or Christian Huygens'
waves, because shadows showed a sharp boundary between the light
and the absence of light. He reasoned that if light was made up of
pulses or waves, it could spread around obstacles or corners as
sound seemed to do. He approximated the speed of sound.
Newton opined that an object moves because of external forces on
it rather than by forces internal to the object.
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