‘My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments.’ So opens Isaac Newton’s Opticks (1704) — the prism experiments, the composition of white light, the rainbow, the colours of thin films, and the famous Queries that set physics’ agenda for a century.
Unlike the Latin Principia, Newton wrote the Opticks in plain English, and it remains astonishingly readable — experiment after experiment you can almost perform from the page. Download the free EPUB and read light explained by the man who did it first.