kb/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opticks-1.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Opticks	2/2	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opticks	reference	science, encyclopedia	2026-05-05T08:46:03.830561+00:00	kb-cron

Newton originally considered to write four books, but he dropped the last book on action at a distance. Instead he concluded Opticks with a set of unanswered questions and positive assertions referred to as queries in Book III. The first set of queries were brief, but the later ones became short essays, filling many pages. In the first edition, these were sixteen such queries; that number was increased to 23 in the Latin edition, published in 1706, and then in the revised English edition, published in 1717–18. In the fourth edition of 1730, there were 31 queries. These queries, especially the later ones, deal with a wide range of physical phenomena that go beyond the topic of optics. The queries concern the nature and transmission of heat; the possible cause of gravity; electrical phenomena; the nature of chemical action; the way in which God created matter; the proper way to do science; and even the ethical conduct of human beings. These queries are not really questions in the ordinary sense. These queries are almost all posed in the negative, as rhetorical questions. That is, Newton does not ask whether light "is" or "may be" a "body." Rather, he declares: "Is not Light a Body?" Stephen Hales, a firm Newtonian of the early eighteenth century, declared that this was Newton's way of explaining "by Quaere."

=== Notable queries === The first query reads: "Do not Bodies act upon Light at a distance, and by their action bend its Rays; and is not this action (caeteris paribus) strongest at the least distance?" suspecting on the effect of gravity on the trajectory of light rays. This query predates the prediction of gravitational lensing by Albert Einstein's general relativity by two centuries and later confirmed by the Eddington experiment in 1919.
Query 3, attempts to explain diffraction and Newton's rings by considering an "eel-like" motion of corpuscles of light when passing by edges. Newton explained earlier that this motion is produced by oscillations in the luminiferous aether creating some interaction between the corpuscles and their own medium. In the 19th century, wave theory superseded this theory, but in the advent of quantum mechanics, some authors consider that pilot wave theory, one of the interpretations of quantum mechanics, vindicates Newton's corpuscular theory in this regard. Query 6 of the book reads "Do not black Bodies conceive heat more easily from Light than those of other Colours do, by reason that the Light falling on them is not reflected outwards, but enters into the Bodies, and is often reflected and refracted within them, until it be stifled and lost?", thereby introducing the concept of a black body. The first part of query 30 reads "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another" thereby anticipating mass-energy equivalence. The last query (number 31) wonders if a corpuscular theory could explain how different substances react more to certain substances than to others, in particular how aqua fortis (nitric acid) reacts more with calamine that with iron. This 31st query has been often been linked to the origin of the concept of affinity in chemical reactions. Various 18th-century historians and chemists, such as William Cullen and Torbern Bergman, credited Newton for the development of affinity tables.

== Reception == The Opticks was widely read and debated in England and in continental Europe. The early presentation of the work to the Royal Society stimulated a bitter dispute between Newton and Robert Hooke over the corpuscular theory of light, which prompted Newton to postpone publication of the work until after Hooke's death in 1703. On the continent, and in France in particular, both the Principia and the Opticks were initially rejected by many natural philosophers, who continued to defend Cartesian natural philosophy and the Aristotelian version of colour, and claimed to find Newton's prism experiments difficult to replicate. Indeed, the Aristotelian theory of the fundamental nature of white light was defended into the 19th century, for example by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his 1810 Theory of Colours (German: Zur Farbenlehre). Newtonian science became a central issue in the assault waged by the philosophes in the Age of Enlightenment against a natural philosophy based on the authority of ancient Greek or ancient Roman naturalists or on deductive reasoning from first principles (the method advocated by the French philosopher René Descartes), rather than on the application of mathematical reasoning to experience or experiment. Voltaire popularised Newtonian science, including the content of both the Principia and the Opticks, in his Elements de la philosophie de Newton (1738), and after about 1750 the combination of the experimental methods exemplified by the Opticks and the mathematical methods exemplified by the Principia were established as a unified and comprehensive model of Newtonian science. Some of the primary adepts in this new philosophy were such prominent figures as Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier and James Black. Subsequent to Newton, much has been amended. Thomas Young and Augustin-Jean Fresnel showed that the wave theory Christiaan Huygens described in his Treatise on Light (1690) could prove that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength. Science also slowly came to recognise the difference between perception of colour and mathematisable optics. Goethe, with his epic diatribe Theory of Colours, could not shake the Newtonian foundation – but, John Tyndall writes in 1880, "one hole Goethe did find in Newton's armour.. Newton had committed himself to the doctrine that refraction without colour was impossible. He therefore thought that the object-glasses of telescopes must for ever remain imperfect, achromatism and refraction being incompatible. This inference was proved by Dollon to be wrong."

== See also == Color theory Luminiferous aether Prism (optics) Theory of Colours Book of Optics (Ibn al-Haytham) Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (Voltaire) Multiple-prism dispersion theory

== Notes ==

== References ==

== External links ==

Full and free online editions of Newton's Opticks

Rarebookroom, First edition ETH-Bibliothek, First edition Gallica, First edition Internet Archive, Fourth edition Project Gutenberg digitized text & images of the Fourth Edition Cambridge University Digital Library, Papers on Hydrostatics, Optics, Sound and Heat – Manuscript papers by Isaac Newton containing draft of Opticks Opticks public domain audiobook at LibriVox