If you’d like to buy a copy of Newton’s Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, published in 1704, there’s one on AbeBooks for £131,245.03, plus £12 P&P. Do people just click on such items, I wonder, and wait for the book to plop through the letterbox a few days later?
Anyway, there is a meaning of optics now being heavily used that Newton wouldn’t have understood. It is not the first time this has happened, because, for pub-going folk, optics are the measures attached to upside-down bottle of spirits to dispense reliably mean doses. Optic in this sense began as a trade name and has been in use only since 1926.
Newton did not invent the term optics for the science of visible light. It had been brought into English from Latin in 1579 by Leonard Digges (not to be confused with his grandson Leonard, the translator of the nicely titled romance Gerardo, the Unfortunate Spaniard).
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