Scientific discoveries never come from nowhere. In a letter to Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton said: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” What he meant by this was that all his discoveries were based on previous discoveries. This is true for all discoveries. Everything we know today, we know because someone before us discovered something that led to our modern discoveries. Before, this person was another, and another, and another. In 1813, a man named Joseph von Fraunhofer discovered strange lines in the spectrum coming from a prism. It was based on the optical work of Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. His discovery would later lead to the work of men such as Robert Bunsen and Niels Bohr. The discovery of Fraunhofer lines was based on previous work in the field of optics and led to numerous discoveries in astronomy, chemistry and physics. In 1604, Johannes Kepler published the book Astronomiae Pars Optica. The book has been considered by many to be the basis of all modern optics. In his research, Kepler discovered many fundamental principles of optics (molecular expressions). He discovered how the eye bends light to form an image. He was one of the first to use a pinhole camera to study how images are formed and how the camera causes the image to form upside down. He later discussed inverted images in another book, Dioptrice (Kepler). He also explained how magnification worked and how telescopes worked. Unfortunately, Johannes Kepler died in 1630. However, his writings on optics laid the foundation for all the work that would follow him. More than 50 years after the publication of Astronomiae Pars Optica, another man continued Kepler's work in the field of optics. optics....... middle of paper ......Optica and Dioptrice, laying the foundation for all future optical discoveries to come. After him, Newton questioned the common belief about light and discovered a fundamental property of how light works and how prisms work. Fraunhofer had spent his entire life working with the same optical principles as Kepler. He performed the same experiment as Newton, but he explored further and opened up new worlds of discovery. Today, we still use spectroscopy and Fraunhofer lines to determine what distant planets and stars are made of and whether life may exist there. Thanks to the discovery of Fraunhofer lines, Niels Bohr was able to develop his model of the atom, thus expanding our knowledge of how the universe works. All of these scientific discoveries have built on each other, and who knows what we'll discover next ??