Sir Isaac Newton’s Use of Quarantine

Sir Isaac Newton accomplished many things in his 84 years on Earth — inventing calculus and discovering the theory of gravity, to name a few —

but one creation most people don’t realize is on the Newton roster of fame is the color wheel.

A study in sunlight: While quarantined due to England’s plague, Newton spent his hours with prisms and mirrors studying how white sunlight split into red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, and blue light. He realized that when the light of three colors — red, green, and blue — combined, they regenerated white light.

Hues in harmony: Newton went on to study how primary colors made secondary colors, and realized this rainbow of hues had a harmonious relationship similar to that of music. Newton gave each hue a musical note and placed those notes on a rotating disk to analyze how they interacted. This music-inspired disk became the color wheel artists know, love, and swear by today.

So, we all might want to do something, be it great or small, during our time of being locked down. Yes, good has to blossom out of it all!