Newton’s optical aether: his draft of a proposed addition to his <i>Optiks</i>

Abstract

Abstract STUDENTS of Newton’s physical thought are now in rather general agreement that—contrary to what various writers have asserted—a belief in an aetherial medium was not throughout his life ‘a central pillar’ of Newton’s system of nature (i). By the time he wrote the Principia, it seems clear, Newton had not only rejected the Cartesian dense aether, but had come to distrust his own youthful aetherial speculations (2); from the 1680’s until some time after 1706, the year the Latin translation of his Opticks appeared, an aether played little or no role in Newton’s conjectural system of nature.