by Len Fisher | 22 Apr 2015 | News
Very pleased that my letter “Music inspired Newton’s rainbow” has now been published online in Nature Vol 250 (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v520/n7548/pdf/520436a.pdf). Even more pleasingly, Nature chose to illustrate my letter with the... 
by Len Fisher | 23 Dec 2014 | Mini Stories from Science
In the last post I gave a brief list of Newton’s achievements (except for one, which I discuss below), but failed to fulfil my self-imposed obligation to say just how he came up with his ideas. In fact, it’s a difficult question to answer, because Newton himself gave... 
by Len Fisher | 22 Dec 2014 | Mini Stories from Science
Christmas Day is, of course, the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus. Isaac Newton, who was born on the same date, spent a great deal of attempting to decipher the Christian scriptures. He wrote much more about this than he did about science, and boy is it... 
by Len Fisher | 9 Dec 2014 | Mini Stories from Science
The story of light is still going, with some very surprising twists, as later posts will show. Light itself can even be twisted, like the fibers in a rope, and also used to lift small objects and move them around. When Newton published his book Opticks in 1704,... 
by Len Fisher | 8 Dec 2014 | Mini Stories from Science
If you want to repeat one of Isaac Newton’s most significant experiments, try holding your index and middle fingers up to the light (don’t do this, as I once did, in a train full of drunken football supporters!). With the tips of the fingers just touching, there will...