Question

What did Newton demonstrate by his experiments with the prism?

Answer 1

Before going to Newton's demonstration let us first get some idea about prism. An optical prism is a light-refracting transparent optical device having flat, polished surfaces. Prisms must have at least one angled surface; objects with two parallel surfaces are not prisms. A triangular prism with a triangle base and rectangular sides is the classic geometrical shape of an optical prism, and "prism" is commonly used to refer to this variety. Some optical prisms do not have the same shape as geometric prisms.

Complete answer:
Isaac Newton was a young scientist studying in England at Cambridge University in. He was tremendously interested in learning everything there was to know about light and colours. Newton darkened his room and drilled a hole in his window shutter one bright sunny day, enabling only one beam of sunshine to penetrate. He then inserted a glass prism into the sunbeam. The end product was a stunning rainbow-like multi-colored ribbon of light. A colour spectrum refers to a multicoloured region of light.

Newton felt that the sunshine coming into his room was the source of all the colours he saw.He reasoned that if he could blend the colours of the spectrum, he should be able to make the light white again. He put an upside-down prism in front of the first prism to see if this was true. He was absolutely correct. The ribbon of hues merged into white sunlight once more. Newton was the first to demonstrate that white light is made up of all visible colours.

Note: Rainbows, which we occasionally see in the sky, work in the same way. When the sun shines in just the right manner on raindrops, the light bends as it passes through them. It extends out and reflects itself in the sky like a brilliant rainbow.