Biography of Newton - Young Readers' Edition of World Historical Famous Figures (Motivational and Concise Version)

Author: Wen Faquan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-01
Features: Newton, born in England in 1642, was a great physicist, astronomer, and mathematician in the history of modern science and technology. He established astronomy by discovering the law of universal gravitation, founded mathematics by proposing the binomial theorem and the theory of infinite series, and created mechanics by understanding the nature of force. He was an important figure in the long journey of human understanding of nature, and his scientific contributions have become a milestone in humanity's exploration of the natural world. He founded the science of optics and achieved significant results in optical research. Based solely on his contributions to optics, he could be considered a great figure in the history of modern science and technology. Newton's research on light began with removing the colors and distorted images in telescopes. In 1665, Newton passed a beam of sunlight through a prism, which decomposed the sunlight into seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. This was a major discovery, proving that ordinary light is composed of seven colors. Newton also used a convex lens to recombine the seven-colored light into white light, further confirming this point. Newton further determined the refractive indices of different colors of light, thereby discovering that the angles of refraction for different colored lights increase in the order of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The color of substances is caused by the different refractive indices of different colored lights in different objects. Newton immediately applied these findings to the manufacture of telescopes, successfully creating a colorless refracting telescope and laying the foundation for modern large optical astronomical telescopes.