In this extract from the new book Beautiful Experiments: An Illustrated History of Experimental Science, science writer Philip Ball explains how Isaac Newton transformed our understanding of light.

Light waves encountering a prism disperse to produce a rainbow of colors. Particles of light, or photons, strike electronic pixels inside digital cameras to create an image.

With this experiment, he proved for the first time that all the colors of the rainbow come from the light, and not directly from the prism. Isaac Newton did more experiments with light, and then ...

Twenty-odd years before Newton stated the three laws of motion, he conducted a simple, breakthrough prism experiment. He poked a hole through his window shade, allowing a single beam of light to ...

Learn about the spectrum of colours found in visible light, how to split white light and the primary and secondary colours of light in this guide for KS3 physics students aged 11-14 from BBC Bitesize.