“one of the supreme productions of the human mind” – E. N. Andrade on Newton’s Opticks

Fourth edition, the last to be corrected by Newton. A note at the beginning states, “This new edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks is carefully printed from the Third edition, as it was corrected by the Author’s own Hand, and left before his Death with the Bookseller.”

In the Opticks Newton presents his theories and experimental findings concerning the nature of light and color. The book’s wide-ranging discoveries and innovations include a description of the composition of white light as a compound of primary colors (previously white was considered to be a pure and simple color of which other colors were variants), the color spectrum, the degrees of refraction of different colors, the first-ever color circle, the first workable theory of the rainbow, and a discussion of the invention of the refracting telescope.

The Opticks and the Principia are the two pillars of Newton’s unparalleled scientific achievement. The Opticks has been called “an underpinning for the entire edifice of physics” (Scientific American). “Through the eighteenth century it dominated the science of optics with almost tyrannical authority, and exercised a broader influence over natural science than the Principia did” (Westfall, Never at Rest).

Unlike most of Newton’s scientific writings, which were published in Latin, the Opticks first appeared in English. “The Opticks invites and holds the attention of the non-specialist reader while … the Principia is as austere and forbidding as it can possibly be. … The latter would discuss for him the mechanism of universal gravitation and give him a hint of the direction of Newton’s thinking about this important problem; but the former would allow the reader to roam, with great Newton as his guide, through the major unresolved problems of science and even the relation of the whole world of nature to Him who had created it” (I. Bernard Cohen).

Please Inquire