Newton's Opticks Published

January 1, 1704

At sixty-one, having completed his alchemy and his theology, Isaac Newton released his lifetime of prism experiments. Light, he argued, was corpuscular; colors were intrinsic, not acquired. Written in English rather than Latin, Opticks spoke directly to a new reading public and helped launch experimental science. Its appendix of unsolved queries would guide British physics for the next century, pointing toward questions Newton himself could not answer.