But he also did some important research about light. Newton found that if he let white light from the sun pass through a simple prism of glass, it produces a precise array of different colors. This would be crucial in his explanation of light. White light, Newton discovered, was in fact a combination of all colors, and the prism was just used to separate them all from each other.
Light is an electromagnetic phenomenon, just like microwave waves, X-rays or television waves.
This is the length of the wave, measured as the distance between two peaks. The narrow range of those waves that are visible to the human eye is called the visible spectrum . The order of colors is constant, and each color has a unique signature identifying its location in the spectrum. Three typical waves of visible light are shown below. The nanometer , abbreviated as nm , is a unit of distance in the metric scale that is used to measure electromagnetic radiation.