Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.14801

    Diagram of a prism

    Date
    13 April 1672
    After
    Ignace-Gaston Pardies (1636 - 1673, French) , Natural philosopher
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Manuscript page number
    p218
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (page): 313mm
    width (page): 197mm
    Subject
    Physics
       > Optics
    Content object
    Description
    A figure of a prism in a copy of Isaac Newton's letter to Henry Oldenburg dated 12 April 1672 (EL/N1/38/001), written in reply to Ignace-Gaston Pardies's criticism of his 'experimentum crucis'. Pardies's comments and Newton's reply were read at the meeting of the Royal Society on 18 April 1672, and printed in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 7, no. 82 (June 1672).
    Object history
    At the meeting of the Royal Society on 18 April 1672, ‘Several letters to Mr. Oldenburg were read. [...] A letter from father Pardies the Jesuit, professor of mathematics in the college of Clermont in Paris, dated there April 9, 1672, N.S. containing some objections against Mr. Newton’s theory of light and colours. A letter from Mr. Newton, dated at Cambridge April 13, 1672, containing an answer to the objection of the said Jesuit’ (Birch, 3:43).

    Printed in I. Newton, ‘Letter of April 13. 1672. Written to the Publisher, Being an Answer to the Fore-Going Letter of P. Pardies’, Phil. Trans. vol. 7, no. 84 (June 1672), pp. 4091-93.
    Related fellows
    Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727, British) , Natural philosopher
    Henry Oldenburg (1612 - 1677, German) , Scientific correspondent
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > United Kingdom
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