, and hated resentment; he was harsh towards enemies but nice to friends. In government, and at the Royal Society, he was an able administrator. He was never married and lived humblely, but was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.
             Newton has been considered for almost 300 years as the founding philsospher of modern physical science, his achievements in experimental investigation as good as those in mathematical research.
             In 1664, while still a student, Newton read recent work on optics and light by the English physicists Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; he also studied both the mathematics and the physics of the French philosopher and scientist Rene' Descartes. He explored the refraction of light by a glass prism; developing over a few years a series of increasingly detailed, refined, and exact experiments, Newton discovered measurable, mathematical patterns in the mircle of color. He found white light to be a mixture of infinitely varied colored rays (shown in the rainbow and the spectrum), each ray identified by the angle through which it is refracted on entering or leaving a given transparent medium. He correlated this notion with his study of the interference colors of thin films , using a simple technique of extreme acuity to measure the thickness of such films. He held that light consisted of streams of minute particles. From his experiments he could conclude the magnitudes of the transparent "corpuscles" forming the surfaces of bodies, which, according to their dimensions, so interacted with white light as to reflect, selectively, the different observed colors of those surfaces.
             The roots of these unconventional ideas were with Newton by about 1668; when first expressed in public in 1672 and 1675, they b
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