Light, colour, darkness: Newton's optical proofs and Goethe's criticism of evidence in the light of modern philosophy of science

In a three-part book, I would like to venture a novel attempt to mediate between Newton's Optics and Goethe's notorious protest against Newtonian optics. It is about the question whether white light is composite (as Newton says) or homogeneous (as Goethe says), and about the extent to which such theoretical claims can be proven. Ever since Goethe's Theory of Colours appeared almost two hundred years ago, physicists, philosophers, psychologists, artists and other authors have repeatedly dealt with individual aspects of the conflict between Goethe's natural science and Newtonian physics; the literature on the subject is almost unmanageable. However, almost all of these contributions have a negative side: either they make Newton strong and lose sight of Goethe's strengths, or vice versa. My project aims to highlight the strengths of both thinkers and bring them together in a new way.
In the first part of the book I will present Newton's most important experiments and reconstruct the conclusions Newton draws from them. In the second part of the book I will extract and continue a particularly fascinating strand of Goethe's theory of colours. In the third part I would like to make a pointed statement myself, firstly by drawing on experimental results that have recently been published, and secondly by evaluating the conflict between Goethe and Newton with regard to the philosophical debate on the thesis of the "underdeterminedness of theory". This thesis states that data alone do not determine which theory can be used to explain them, so there must always be alternative theories. All in all, I would like to escape the all too simple question of Goethe or Newton? in order to get beyond both thinkers in a constructive way instead.