Science and Poetry are Like Binary Stars

I would liken science and poetry in their natural independence to those binary stars, often different in colour, which Herschel's telescope discovered to revolve round each other. 'There is one light of the sun,' says St. Paul, 'and another of the moon, and another of the stars: star differeth from star in glory.' It is so here. That star or sun, for it is both, with its cold, clear, white light, is SCIENCE: that other, with its gorgeous and ever-shifting hues and magnificent blaze, is POETRY...

 Newton's Experiment Proving White Contains All Colors

Newton wasn't the first person to make a rainbow with a prism. Other people had already got the same result. But many of them thought the prism somehow 'coloured' the white light, like adding a dye. Newton's idea was quite different. He thought that white light was a mixture of all the colours, and the prism was just separating them from each other. He was right, and he proved it with a pair of neat experiments. First, he took his prism, as before, and stuck a narrow slit in the way of the co...