Newton's Disk

ESSAY

(newton's disk)

In about 1666 Newton passed sunlight through a triangular glass prism and obtained a spectrum of colors. The sunlight was dispersed (split up) by the prism into its component colors, and spread out on paper.

The first color wheel has been attributed to Sir Isaac Newton, who in 1706 arranged red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet into a natural progression on a rotating disk. As the disk spins, the colors blur together so rapidly that the human eye sees white, That's because light is one small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and color is just a wavelength. While it appears as though the color wheel is the visible spectrum of colors placed on a wheel, the real basis for the color wheel is rooted in Sir Isaac Newton’s experiments with prisms. His experiments led to the theory that red, yellow and blue were the primary colors from which all other colors are derived. While that’s not entirely true, it’s still influential in the color wheels developed in the early 1800s as well as the color wheel currently used today.

What is “light”?

Like Eli Sirlin says in his book "The light in the theater" the Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation, called radiant energy, able to excite Human retina and produce, therefore, a visual sensation.

Light could be seen as “unimaginable crowds and screaming fast small corpuscles of various sizes." (Isaac Newton (1642-1727))

Properties of light

• Amplitude (wave height) .

• Wavelength (spatial behavior) : [nm ] .

• Frequency (temporal behavior) : v [ Hz ] , defined by

The number of waves that pass a second through a fixed point

• Speed: c [ m / sec] It is the distance that wave travels in 1 second.

The color perceived by our eyes is one that does not absorb light, and depending on the different light sources and different shades and colors they emit, the objects are of different hues and intensities.

An object is not the same when it's sunny, it's cloudy or is illuminated by a fluorescent light. All the lights acting on an object affect its final appearance

Newton´s disk consequences

After several studies were classified into three primary colors, three secondary colors and one tertiary color. This combination of colors is called RGB . A concept that served the Newton itself to deepen the study of light and optics although it was not the only one. René Descartes also was interested in everything related to light and their physical and made some really interesting findings, which, still today serve as the basis of modern physics. The best known is, undoubtedly, the fact of obtaining the relationship they had the diffraction angles of each of the seven colors in the white light was composed about themselves. An angle

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