Episodes

6 episodes in this season

Vitruvian Man

60 min

Copernicus

60 min

Now Playing

The Crucial Experiment, Isaac Newton

60 min

The Rose Diagram, Florence Nightingale

60 min

DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick

60 min

Pioneer Plaque

60 min

The Beauty of Diagrams

TV Series

20101h

Documentary

Now playing

The Crucial Experiment, Isaac Newton

Season 1 · Episode 3 · Dec 2, 2010

In the mid-1660s, Isaac Newton bought a pair of prisms at a fair near Cambridge, which were to be the basis of a series of experiments that would unlock a secret that had occupied scientists for centuries - the nature of light itself. To explain what he had done, Newton created a diagram. It is called The Crucial Experiment and is a pivotal image in scientific history, a graphic moment when the ancient world was overturned by modern science. Newton demonstrated that white light is not pure, but made up of a number of different colours, the colours of the rainbow. Newton's ideas transformed our knowledge of what we see and how we see, and the prism and its refracted colours became a captivating image. From fibre-optics to the cover of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album, Newton's work went on to influence centuries of science and art.

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The Beauty of Diagrams

TV Series

20101h

Documentary

Now playing

The Crucial Experiment, Isaac Newton

Season 1 · Episode 3 · Dec 2, 2010

More details