Newton磗 optics. Coloured historical artwork of the English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton 1642_1727 conducting his famous experiment on light. He is using a prism to refract a ray of light from a hole in the shutters over a window. A white surface far left showed that light splits into the different colours spectrum observed in rainbows. Newton failed to further split the colours, but later remixed the colours using a lens and prism. He carried out this experiment while at Cambridge University, but the results were not known until he published his book, Opticks, in 1704.