2022/04/20 by Virginia Cain
#Newton #decomposition of sunlight #experiment.
paper · doi:10.5526/esj99
Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York, at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time (2002). I have chosen to write about Newton’s decomposition of sunlight with a prism because it is one I find inspiring and interesting. There is meaning attached to the experiment, and one’s definition of beautiful can be applied in different ways. In this article I will be describing the design of this particular experiment as carried out by Newton, as well as discussing the results, and what can be inferred or deduced from them.