Using Kepler's third law of planetary motion, and his own law of centrifugal force, Newton was able to arrive upon his law of inverse squares. This law states "....that the Attraction always is in a duplicate proportion to the Distance from the Center Reciprocall...." (MacTutor). Using this law, Newton studied the heavens for many years till the completion of one of many books, the "Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica or Principia" (MacTutor).

His 'Principia' was one of his greatest achievements in astronomy. It stated that all the bodies in the heavens were attracted to one another through centripital forces, and eliptical paths. He studied how the stars moved across the sky, and recorded were the local planets were located within the heavens. He then used this data to arrive upon a fundimental idea that all the "heavenly bodies" were attracted to the sun, based upon the square of it's relative distance.

Isaac Newton was one of the first to challenge the idea of white light not being a single entity, but instead a combination of several base rays. Based on his ideas, and research, Newton created, and published, his first scientific paper "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society." His ideas were both taked in lightly, and rejected severly. Robert Hooke, a famous scientist of his time, was one of many to openly reject Newtons "theroem." He accused Newton of stealing some of his optical experiments, but through an exchange of letters, the two finally settled their disputes (MacTutor). After Hooke's death, Newton published a full elistment of his research on optics. Newton used a prism to split the light into the base particles, and thus proved that light was not a single entity.