Isaac Newton held a clear glass prism to the sunbeam that penetrated the shutters of his darkened room and watched in awe as the wall of his office danced with all the colors of the rainbow.
The 28-year-old physicist at Trinity College, Cambridge, was the first to show that white light is a blend of primary colors, a discovery that explains why grass is green and the sky is blue.
His written account of the experiment in 1671 is among the oldest in a collection of scientific milestones described in “Letters to the Royal Society,” which were made public yesterday to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Britain’s academy of science. The documents were released through an online library project called “Trailblazing,” a name inspired by Newton’s famous nod to the work of his predecessors in a note to his rival Robert Hooke: “If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
The letters to the society record the march of science from the earliest blood transfusions and attempts to capture lightning, to the confirmation of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the discovery of DNA and Stephen Hawking’s first musings on black holes.
“At that time, the only scientists who were in any sense professionals were astronomers and maybe medical doctors, and of the two, the astronomers were the only ones who probably did more good than harm,” said professor Martin Rees, astronomer royal and president of the society. “If you look at these records, you can’t help but notice the immense range of interests they had. They were motivated by curiosity.”
There is the letter from the chemist Robert Boyle, asking the physician Richard Lower about the consequences of transfusing blood from one animal into another. Does a dog lose its quirks after transfusion and gain those of the donor? Does blood from a big dog make a small dog grow? Can you safely replace a frog’s blood with blood from a calf and might that change one species into another? The answers were no, no, no and no.
That did not stop Lower moving on to human experiments, paying an “addle-brained” man 20 shillings to receive blood from a lamb. There were hopes it might cure the man’s mental condition, but when Samuel Pepys, a president of the society, questioned the physician afterwards, Lower noted that his subject was still “a little cracked in the head.”
A letter from Benjamin Franklin from 1752 dispels the myth that lightning is a supernatural force. He recounts an experiment that he was lucky to survive, involving a thunderstorm and a kite armed with a long metal spike.
On witnessing the Montgolfier brothers’ hot air balloon flight, Franklin declared such a device might be strapped to one’s errand boy, so he could hop over hedges more swiftly as he ran from house to house. Or it could carry wine to great altitude and keep it cool.
In 1769, the English naturalist Daines Barrington wrote to the society after a barrage of tests confirmed that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was indeed a child genius. Barrington visited the eight-year-old at his parents’ home and asked him to play scores he had never seen, and to compose on the spot.
“His execution was amazing, considering his little fingers could scarcely reach a fifth on the harpsichord,” Barrington wrote on hearing one recital.
He vouched for Mozart’s age by confirming birth certificate details and documenting his behavior.
“Whilst he was playing to me, a favorite cat came in, upon which he immediately left his harpsichord, nor could we bring him back for a considerable time,” he wrote.
After a safe return to Britain aboard HMS Resolution, Captain James Cook wrote to the Royal Society in 1776 to disclose how he saved his crew from scurvy by filling the hold with “sweet-wort,” sauerkraut, lemons and vegetables.
One sailor died of an unrelated disease.
“Two others were unfortunately drowned and one killed by a fall; so of the whole number with which I set out from England, I lost only four,” Cook wrote.
To mark the anniversary, the society is calling leading researchers together to thrash out the biggest issues for modern science. Feeding the world and providing clean, green energy will doubtless feature, as will more basic questions on the nature of ageing and consciousness.
“Our world is completely transformed through the application of scientific concepts which could not even be conceived of at the time the society was founded,” Rees said. “New questions come into focus as old ones are answered. The important thing about science is it’s an unending quest.”
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