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He called it the Experimentum Crucis, taking the word from Bacon.
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Okay, so light came in through a hole in the window, through a lens,
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and then got bent and dispersed into the different colors.
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So you get a spectrum here on this thing,
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the different colors.
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Now there's the question, how does the prism make color?
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Hooke and Descartes thought that light was a train of pulses
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and as it goes through something like a prism,
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or as it reflects from a thin layer of oil on water or something like that,
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that it changes the timing of the pulses
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and therefore changes the color.
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But Newton thought that the colors were pre-existing,