A COLLECTION OF NEWTON'S LECTURES ON OPTICS
THE OPTICAL PAPERS OF ISAAC NEWTON, Volume I
THE OPTICAL LECTURES 1670-1672
Edited by Alan E. Shapiro
1984 Cambridge UP edition, illustrated. Near fine condition.
Description: Isaac Newton; Edited by Alan Shapiro THE OPTICAL PAPERS OF ISAAC NEWTON, VOLUME 1, The Optical Lectures 1670-1672 New York:Cambridge University Press, 1984, 10 x 7 in., 627 pp. Illustrated.
Condition: Hardbound in blue cloth with gilt title on spine. Original pictorial dustjacket. Former owner's bookplate (Copernicus scholar Owen Gingerich) inside front cover. Dustjacket slightly worn; otherwise book is in near fine condition--clean, crisp, tightly bound, and unmarked throughout.
Information: An important collection of lectures by Newton on optics, translated into English along with the original Latin. From the publisher's blurb:
This first volume of a planned three-volume complete edition
of Newton's optical papers contains his Optical Lectures, delivered at
Cambridge University between 1670 and 1672. For his inaugural lectures as
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Newton chose to draw upon his recent
extensive series of investigations and expound, in all its ramifications, his
revolutionary new theory that sunlight consists of rays of different color,
each unequally refracted. It is in the Optical Lectures that he presents his
most comprehensively developed mathematical and experimental account of his
theory of color and refraction.
The Lectures is Newton's first major scientific
treatise, and consequently it represents a crucial link between his early years
of discovery and his mature investigations and publications, such as the Opticks
of 1704. It is divided into two parts. In the part devoted to color, Newton
demonstrates his new theory with a large number of often ingenious experiments,
and then he applies that theory to explain a variety of phenomena, such as the
colors produced by prisms. In the part devoted to refraction, Newton first describes
various ways to measure the refractions of fluids and solids, and then he
attempts to develop a mathematical theory of refraction dispersion, which makes
some significant contributions to geometrical optics.
This edition publishes for the first time the complete text,
together with translation and commentary, of both 'surviving versions of the Lectures,
a draft and a vastly expanded revision. Until now scholars have had to depend
on an uncritical text of the revision and an inadequate partial English
translation, both published shortly after Newton's death. Professor Shapiro's
critical edition of this important work will accordingly be of great value to
the study of Newtonian science.
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