Article ID: CBB000831780

Reading Up on the Opticks. Refashioning Newton's Theories of Light and Colors in Eighteenth-Century Textbooks (2008)

unapi

Dijksterhuis, Fokko Jan (Author)


Perspectives on Science
Volume: 16
Pages: 309--327


Publication Date: 2008
Edition Details: First article in a Special Issue on Optics
Language: English

Robert Smith's A Compleat System of Opticks (1738) was the most prominent eighteenth-century text-book account of Newton's optics. By rearranging the findings and conclusions of Opticks, it made them accessible to a wider public and at the same time refashioned Newton's optics into a renewed science of optics. In this process, the optical parts of Principia were integrated, thus blending the experimental inferences and mechanistic hypotheses that Newton had carefully separated. The Compleat System was not isolated in its refashioning of Newton's optics. Dutch and English promoters of the new philosophy had preceded Smith by giving Opticks a text-book treatment, and they too integrated experimental and mechanistic inferences. In this way eighteenth-century text-books produced a natural philosophical discourse of light, colors and matter. This paper traces the refashioning of Newton's optics in Dutch and English text-books of natural philosophy during the first half of the eighteenth century. It concludes with the Dutch translation of A Compleat System of Opticks and its reception among innovators of telescope manufacture.

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Description Contents:


Includes Series Articles

Article Dupré, Sven (2008) Newton's Telescope in Print: The Role of Images in the Reception of Newton's Instrument. Perspectives on Science (p. 328). unapi

Article Gage, John (2008) Signs of Disharmony: Newton's Opticks and the Artists. Perspectives on Science (p. 360). unapi

Article Jackson, Myles W. (2008) Putting the Subject back into Color: Accessibility in Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre. Perspectives on Science (p. 378). unapi

Article Pedersen, Kurt Møller (2008) Leonhard Euler's Wave Theory of Light. Perspectives on Science (p. 392). unapi

Article Shapiro, Alan E. (2008) Twenty-Nine Years in the Making: Newton's Opticks. Perspectives on Science (p. 417). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000831780/

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Authors & Contributors
Moura, Breno Arsioli
Morris, Andrew M. A.
Zuidervaart, Huib
Abou-Nemeh, Samar Catherine
Zuidervaart, Huibert Jan
Stedall, Jacqueline Anne
Concepts
Optics
Natural philosophy
Light
Physics
Color
Telescopes
Time Periods
18th century
17th century
Early modern
19th century
16th century
Places
Netherlands
England
Great Britain
France
Hague (Nethelands)
Scotland
Institutions
Académie des Sciences, Paris
Royal Society of London
Dollond and Aitchison (firm)
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