Issac Newton
... light by the English physicists Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; he also studied both the mathematics and the physics of the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes. He investigated the refraction of light by a glass prism; developing over a few years a series of increasingly complex, sophisticated, and exact experiments, Newton discovered measurable, mathematical patterns in the phenomenon of color. He found white light to be a mixture of infinitely varied colored rays (obvious in the rainbow and the spectrum), each ray definable by the angle through which it is refracted on entering or leaving a given transparent object. He connected this idea with his study of the interference colors of thin films (for example, of oil on water, or soap bubbles), using a simple technique of extreme perception to measure the thickness of such films. He held that light consisted of streams of minute particles. Newton formulated the classical theories of mechanics and optics and invented calculus years before Leibniz. However, he did not publish his work on calculus until after Leibniz had published his. This led to a bitter priority dispute between English and continental mathematicians which persisted for decades. Newton had the essence of the methods of fluxions by 1666. The first to become known, privately, to other mathematicians, in 1668, was his method of integration by infinite series. In Paris in 1675, Leibniz independently evolved the first ideas of his differential calculus, outlined to Newton in 1677. Newton had already described some of his mathematical discoveries to Leibniz, not including his method of fluxions. In 1684 Leibniz published his first paper on calculus; a small group of mathematicians took up his ideas. In the 1690s Newton's friends proclaimed the main concern of Newton's methods of fluxions (flow). Supporters of Leibniz asserted that he had communicated the differential method to Newton, although Leibniz had claimed no such thing. Newtonians then asserted, rightly, that Leibniz had seen papers of Newton's during a London visit in 1676; in reality, Leibniz had taken no notice of material on fluxions. A violent dispute sprang up, part public, part private, extended by Leibniz to attacks on Newton's theory of gravitation and his ideas about God and creation. It was not ended even by Leibniz's death in 1716. The dispute delayed the welcome of Newtonian science on the Continent, and stopped British mathematicians from sharing the researches of Continental generations for a century. Newton left a mass of manuscripts on the subjects of alchemy and chemistry, then closely related topics. Most of these were extracts from books, bibliographies, dictionaries, and so on, but a few are original. He began intensive experimentation in 1669, continuing till he left Cambridge, seeking to unravel the meaning that he hoped was hidden in alchemical obscurity and mysticism. He sought understanding of the nature and structure of all matter, formed from the "solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles" that he believed God had created. Most importantly in the "Queries" appended to "Opticks" and in the essay "On the Nature of Acids" (1710), Newton published an incomplete theory of chemical force, concealing his exploration of the alchemists, which became known a century after his death. In Book I of Principia, Newto...