The core of Newton’s contribution had to do with colours. The corpuscular conception of light was always a speculative theory on the periphery of his optics, however. Newton fully accepted the mechanical nature of light, although he chose the atomistic alternative and held that light consists of material corpuscles in motion. Descartes had also made light central to the mechanical philosophy of nature the reality of light, he argued, consists of motion transmitted through a material medium. Descartes’s statement of the sine law of refraction, relating the angles of incidence and emergence at interfaces of the media through which light passes, had added a new mathematical regularity to the science of light, supporting the conviction that the universe is constructed according to mathematical regularities.

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