What is christiaan huygens known for
In particular, he sought explanations that relied on contact between bodies and avoided action at a distance. In common with Robert Boyle and Jacques Rohault , Huygens advocated an experimentally oriented, mechanical natural philosophy during his Paris years. Shortly afterwards, he reevaluated Boyle's experimental design and developed a series of experiments meant to test a new hypothesis.
Newton's influence on John Locke was mediated by Huygens, who assured Locke that Newton's mathematics was sound, leading to Locke's acceptance of a corpuscular-mechanical physics. The general approach of the mechanical philosophers was to postulate theories of the kind now called "contact action. While Huygens was influenced by the Cartesian approach, he was less doctrinaire.
Huygens concluded quite early that Descartes's laws for elastic collisions were largely wrong, and he formulated the correct laws, including the conservation of the product of mass times the square of the speed for hard bodies, and the conservation of quantity of motion in one direction for all bodies. In Huygens found the constant of gravitational acceleration and stated what is now known as the second of Newton's laws of motion in quadratic form.
In modern notation:. The general idea for the centrifugal force, however, was published in and was a significant step in studying orbits in astronomy. It enabled the transition from Kepler's third law of planetary motion to the inverse square law of gravitation. The approach used by Huygens also missed some central notions of mathematical physics, which were not lost on others.
In his work on pendulums Huygens came very close to the theory of simple harmonic motion ; the topic, however, was covered fully for the first time by Newton in Book II of the Principia Mathematica In , inspired by earlier research into pendulums as regulating mechanisms, Huygens invented the pendulum clock, which was a breakthrough in timekeeping and became the most accurate timekeeper for almost years until the s.
Clocks prior to this would lose about 15 minutes per day, whereas Huygens's clock would lose about 15 seconds per day. Part of the incentive for inventing the pendulum clock was to create an accurate marine chronometer that could be used to find longitude by celestial navigation during sea voyages. However, the clock proved unsuccessful as a marine timekeeper because the rocking motion of the ship disturbed the motion of the pendulum.
In , Lodewijk Huygens made a trial on a voyage to Spain, and reported that heavy weather made the clock useless. Alexander Bruce entered the field in , and Huygens called in Sir Robert Moray and the Royal Society to mediate and preserve some of his rights. A trial for the French Academy on an expedition to Cayenne ended badly. Jean Richer suggested correction for the figure of the Earth.
Sixteen years after the invention of the pendulum clock, in , Huygens published his major work on horology entitled Horologium Oscillatorium: Sive de Motu Pendulorum ad Horologia Aptato Demonstrationes Geometricae The Pendulum Clock: or Geometrical demonstrations concerning the motion of pendula as applied to clocks.
Wave theory of light
It is the first modern work on mechanics where a physical problem is idealized by a set of parameters then analysed mathematically. Huygens's motivation came from the observation, made by Mersenne and others, that pendulums are not quite isochronous : their period depends on their width of swing, with wide swings taking slightly longer than narrow swings.
By geometrical methods which anticipated the calculus , Huygens showed it to be a cycloid , rather than the circular arc of a pendulum's bob, and therefore that pendulums needed to move on a cycloid path in order to be isochronous. The mathematics necessary to solve this problem led Huygens to develop his theory of evolutes, which he presented in Part III of his Horologium Oscillatorium.
He also solved a problem posed by Mersenne earlier: how to calculate the period of a pendulum made of an arbitrarily-shaped swinging rigid body. This involved discovering the centre of oscillation and its reciprocal relationship with the pivot point. In the same work, he analysed the conical pendulum , consisting of a weight on a cord moving in a circle, using the concept of centrifugal force.
Huygens was the first to derive the formula for the period of an ideal mathematical pendulum with mass-less rod or cord and length much longer than its swing , in modern notation:. By his study of the oscillation period of compound pendulums Huygens made pivotal contributions to the development of the concept of moment of inertia. Huygens also observed coupled oscillations : two of his pendulum clocks mounted next to each other on the same support often became synchronized, swinging in opposite directions.
He reported the results by letter to the Royal Society, and it is referred to as " an odd kind of sympathy " in the Society's minutes. In , while investigating the oscillating properties of the cycloid, Huygens was able to transform a cycloidal pendulum into a vibrating spring through a combination of geometry and higher mathematics.
20 facts about christiaan huygens biography wikipedia
These watches are notable for lacking a fusee for equalizing the mainspring torque. The implication is that Huygens thought his spiral spring would isochronize the balance in the same way that cycloid-shaped suspension curbs on his clocks would isochronize the pendulum. He later used spiral springs in more conventional watches, made for him by Thuret in Paris.
Such springs are essential in modern watches with a detached lever escapement because they can be adjusted for isochronism. Watches in Huygens's time, however, employed the very ineffective verge escapement , which interfered with the isochronal properties of any form of balance spring, spiral or otherwise. Huygens's design came around the same time as, though independently of, Robert Hooke's.
Controversy over the priority of the balance spring persisted for centuries. In February , a long-lost copy of Hooke's handwritten notes from several decades of Royal Society meetings was discovered in a cupboard in Hampshire , England, presumably tipping the evidence in Hooke's favour. Huygens had a long-term interest in the study of light refraction and lenses or dioptrics.
Huygens was one of the few to raise theoretical questions regarding the properties and working of the telescope, and almost the only one to direct his mathematical proficiency towards the actual instruments used in astronomy. Huygens repeatedly announced its publication to his colleagues but ultimately postponed it in favor of a much more comprehensive treatment, now under the name of the Dioptrica.
The first part focused on the general principles of refraction, the second dealt with spherical and chromatic aberration , while the third covered all aspects of the construction of telescopes and microscopes. In contrast to Descartes' dioptrics which treated only ideal elliptical and hyperbolical lenses, Huygens dealt exclusively with spherical lenses, which were the only kind that could really be made and incorporated in devices such as microscopes and telescopes.
Huygens also worked out practical ways to minimize the effects of spherical and chromatic aberration, such as long focal distances for the objective of a telescope, internal stops to reduce the aperture, and a new kind of ocular known as the Huygenian eyepiece. Together with his brother Constantijn, Huygens began grinding his own lenses in in an effort to improve telescopes.
Lenses were also a common interest through which Huygens could meet socially in the s with Spinoza , who ground them professionally. They had rather different outlooks on science, Spinoza being the more committed Cartesian, and some of their discussion survives in correspondence. He is credited as the inventor of the magic lantern , described in correspondence of The challenge at the time was to explain geometrical optics , as most physical optics phenomena such as diffraction had not been observed or appreciated as issues.
Huygens had experimented in with double refraction birefringence in the Iceland spar a calcite , a phenomenon discovered in by Rasmus Bartholin. At first, he could not elucidate what he found but was later able to explain it using his wavefront theory and concept of evolutes. Propagation of the wavefronts is then explained as the result of spherical waves being emitted at every point along the wave front known today as the Huygens—Fresnel principle.
The nature of light was therefore a longitudinal wave. His theory of light was not widely accepted, while Newton's rival corpuscular theory of light , as found in his Opticks , gained more support. One strong objection to Huygens's theory was that longitudinal waves have only a single polarization which cannot explain the observed birefringence.
Fresnel became aware of Huygens's work and in was able to explain birefringence as a result of light being not a longitudinal as had been assumed but actually a transverse wave. In , Huygens discovered the first of Saturn's moons, Titan , and observed and sketched the Orion Nebula using a refracting telescope with a 43x magnification of his own design.
20 facts about christiaan huygens biography for kids
More than three years later, in , Huygens published his theory and findings in Systema Saturnium. It is considered the most important work on telescopic astronomy since Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius fifty years earlier. In the same year, Huygens was able to observe Syrtis Major , a volcanic plain on Mars. This figure is only a few minutes off of the actual length of the Martian day of 24 hours, 37 minutes.
At the instigation of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Huygens undertook the task of constructing a mechanical planetarium that could display all the planets and their moons then known circling around the Sun. Huygens completed his design in and had his clockmaker Johannes van Ceulen built it the following year. In his design, Huygens made an ingenious use of continued fractions to find the best rational approximations by which he could choose the gears with the correct number of teeth.
The ratio between two gears determined the orbital periods of two planets. To move the planets around the Sun, Huygens used a clock-mechanism that could go forwards and backwards in time. Shortly before his death in , Huygens completed his most speculative work entitled Cosmotheoros. At his direction, it was to be published only posthumously by his brother, which Constantijn Jr.
Such speculations were not uncommon at the time, justified by Copernicanism or the plenitude principle , but Huygens went into greater detail, though without acknowledging Newton's laws of gravitation or the fact that planetary atmospheres are composed of different gases. Huygens wrote that availability of water in liquid form was essential for life and that the properties of water must vary from planet to planet to suit the temperature range.
He took his observations of dark and bright spots on the surfaces of Mars and Jupiter to be evidence of water and ice on those planets. Huygens postulated that the great distance between the planets signified that God had not intended for beings on one to know about the beings on the others, and had not foreseen how much humans would advance in scientific knowledge.
It was also in this book that Huygens published his estimates for the relative sizes of the solar system and his method for calculating stellar distances. The subject of photometry remained in its infancy until the time of Pierre Bouguer and Johann Heinrich Lambert. Huygens has been called the first theoretical physicist and a founder of modern mathematical physics.
In mathematics, Huygens mastered the methods of ancient Greek geometry , particularly the work of Archimedes, and was an adept user of the analytic geometry and infinitesimal techniques of Descartes and Fermat. Drawing inspiration and imagery from mechanics, it remained pure mathematics in form. Huygens was moreover able to fully employ mathematics to answer questions of physics.
Often this entailed introducing a simple model for describing a complicated situation, then analyzing it starting from simple arguments to their logical consequences, developing the necessary mathematics along the way. As he wrote at the end of a draft of De vi Centrifuga : [ 33 ]. Whatever you will have supposed not impossible either concerning gravity or motion or any other matter, if then you prove something concerning the magnitude of a line, surface, or body, it will be true; as for instance, Archimedes on the quadrature of the parabola , where the tendency of heavy objects has been assumed to act through parallel lines.
Huygens favoured axiomatic presentations of his results, which require rigorous methods of geometric demonstration: although he allowed levels of uncertainty in the selection of primary axioms and hypotheses, the proofs of theorems derived from these could never be in doubt.
Besides the application of mathematics to physics and physics to mathematics, Huygens relied on mathematics as methodology, specifically its ability to generate new knowledge about the world. Although never intended for publication, Huygens made use of algebraic expressions to represent physical entities in a handful of his manuscripts on collisions.
Huygens's standing as the greatest scientist in Europe was eclipsed by Newton's at the end of the seventeenth century, despite the fact that, as Hugh Aldersey-Williams notes, "Huygens's achievement exceeds that of Newton in some important respects". Huygens's analyses of curves that satisfy certain physical properties, such as the cycloid , led to later studies of many other such curves like the caustic, the brachistochrone , the sail curve, and the catenary.
These were the first reliable timekeepers fit for scientific use e. During his lifetime, Huygens and his father had a number of portraits commissioned. These included:. The European Space Agency spacecraft that landed on Titan , Saturn 's largest moon, in was named after him. A number of monuments to Christiaan Huygens can be found across important cities in the Netherlands, including Rotterdam , Delft , and Leiden.
Source s : [ 17 ]. Contents move to sidebar hide.
Richard feynman: Christiaan Huygens was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer who formulated the wave theory of light. He also discovered the pendulum clock, centrifugal force and the true shape of the rings of Saturn (as well as its moon, Titan).
Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. Dutch mathematician and physicist — For the ocean liner, see MS Christiaan Huygens. The Hague , Dutch Republic. University of Leiden University of Angers.
Mathematics Physics Astronomy Mechanics Horology. Second law of motion. History Timeline Textbooks. Newton's laws of motion. Analytical mechanics Lagrangian mechanics Hamiltonian mechanics Routhian mechanics Hamilton—Jacobi equation Appell's equation of motion Koopman—von Neumann mechanics. Core topics. Motion linear Newton's law of universal gravitation Newton's laws of motion Relative velocity Rigid body dynamics Euler's equations Simple harmonic motion Vibration.
Circular motion Rotating reference frame Centripetal force Centrifugal force reactive Coriolis force Pendulum Tangential speed Rotational frequency. Biography [ edit ]. Student years [ edit ]. Early correspondence [ edit ]. Scientific debut [ edit ]. France [ edit ]. Final years [ edit ]. Mathematics [ edit ]. Published works [ edit ].
Theoremata de Quadratura [ edit ]. He published major studies of mechanics and optics, and a pioneer work on games of chance. The first work he published was Theoremata de quadratura which he published in In the same year he observed and sketched the Orion Nebula. He called his first sketch Systema Saturnium. He was always slow, and reluctant to publish new works because he wanted to protect his reputation.
His teachers were all like this too.
The first astronomer to identify Saturn's ring s as flat was Christiaan Huygens, a Dutchman who suggested the ring was flat he thought there was only one ring. Saturn has at least 62 moons around it, ranging from very small to very large, such as Titan that was first observed in by Christiaan Huygens. Saturn's two moons, Janus and Epimetheus, swap orbits every 4 years.
His work included early telescopic studies of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan, the invention of the pendulum clock and other investigations in timekeeping. In Huygens used a telescope he created himself to view Saturn, and discovered Titan, one of Saturn's moons. Huygens was the second oldest son out of five children of Constantijn Huygens and Suzanna van Baerle.
20 facts about christiaan huygens biography
The war ended in , and Christiaan Huygens announced his results to the Royal Society in In Christiaan Huygens found the constant of gravitational acceleration and stated what is known as the second of Newton's laws of motion in quadratic form. Christiaan Huygens derived geometrically the now standard formula for the centrifugal force, exerted on an object when viewed in a rotating frame of reference, for instance when driving around a curve.
Christiaan Huygens collected his results in a treatise under the title De vi Centrifuga, unpublished until , where the kinematics of free fall were used to produce the first generalized conception of force prior to Newton. Yet, the interpretation of Newton's work on gravitation by Christiaan Huygens differed from that of Newtonians such as Roger Cotes: he did not insist on the a priori attitude of Descartes, but neither would he accept aspects of gravitational attractions that were not attributable in principle to contact between particles.
The approach used by Christiaan Huygens missed some central notions of mathematical physics, which were not lost on others. In , inspired by earlier research into pendulums as regulating mechanisms, Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock, which was a breakthrough in timekeeping and became the most accurate timekeeper for almost years until the s.
Christiaan Huygens contracted the construction of his clock designs to Salomon Coster in The Hague, who built the clock. In , Lodewijk Christiaan Huygens made a trial on a voyage to Spain, and reported that heavy weather made the clock useless. Alexander Bruce elbowed into the field in , and Christiaan Huygens called in Sir Robert Moray and the Royal Society to mediate and preserve some of his rights.
Sixteen years after the invention of the pendulum clock, in , Christiaan Huygens published his major work on horology entitled Horologium Oscillatorium: Sive de Motu Pendulorum ad Horologia Aptato Demonstrationes Geometricae. Christiaan Huygens's motivation came from the observation, made by Mersenne and others, that pendulums are not quite isochronous: their period depends on their width of swing, with wide swings taking slightly longer than narrow swings.
Christiaan Huygens tackled this problem by finding the curve down which a mass will slide under the influence of gravity in the same amount of time, regardless of its starting point; the so-called tautochrone problem. The mathematics necessary to solve this problem led Christiaan Huygens to develop his theory of evolutes, which he presented in Part III of his Horologium Oscillatorium.
Christiaan Huygens solved a problem posed by Mersenne earlier: how to calculate the period of a pendulum made of an arbitrarily-shaped swinging rigid body. Christiaan Huygens was the first to derive the formula for the period of an ideal mathematical pendulum, in modern notation:. Christiaan Huygens observed coupled oscillations: two of his pendulum clocks mounted next to each other on the same support often became synchronized, swinging in opposite directions.
Christiaan Huygens reported the results by letter to the Royal Society, and it is referred to as "an odd kind of sympathy" in the Society's minutes. In , while investigating the oscillating properties of the cycloid, Christiaan Huygens was able to transform a cycloidal pendulum into a vibrating spring through a combination of geometry and higher mathematics.
The implication is that Christiaan Huygens thought his spiral spring would isochronize the balance in the same way that cycloid-shaped suspension curbs on his clocks would isochronize the pendulum. Christiaan Huygens later used spiral springs in more conventional watches, made for him by Thuret in Paris. Watches in Christiaan Huygens's time employed the very ineffective verge escapement, which interfered with the isochronal properties of any form of balance spring, spiral or otherwise.
Christiaan Huygens's design came around the same time as, though independently of, Robert Hooke's. Christiaan Huygens had a long-term interest in the study of light refraction and lenses or dioptrics. Christiaan Huygens was one of the few to raise theoretical questions regarding the properties and working of the telescope, and almost the only one to direct his mathematical proficiency towards the actual instruments used in astronomy.
Christiaan Huygens repeatedly announced its publication to his colleagues but ultimately postponed it in favor of a much more comprehensive treatment, now under the name of the Dioptrica. In contrast to Descartes' dioptrics which treated only ideal lenses, Christiaan Huygens dealt exclusively with spherical lenses, which were the only kind that could really be made and incorporated in devices such as microscopes and telescopes.
Christiaan Huygens worked out practical ways to minimize the effects of spherical and chromatic aberration, such as long focal distances for the objective of a telescope, internal stops to reduce the aperture, and a new kind of ocular known as the Huygenian eyepiece. Together with his brother Constantijn, Christiaan Huygens began grinding his own lenses in in an effort to improve telescopes.
Shortly before his death in , Huygens completed his most speculative work entitled Cosmotheoros. At his direction, it was to be published only posthumously by his brother, which Constantijn Jr. In this work, Huygens speculated on the existence of extraterrestrial life , which he imagined similar to that on Earth.
Huygens wrote that availability of water in liquid form was essential for life and that the properties of water must vary from planet to planet to suit the temperature range. He took his observations of dark and bright spots on the surfaces of Mars and Jupiter to be evidence of water and ice on those planets. He argued that extraterrestrial life is neither confirmed nor denied by the Bible, and questioned why God would create the other planets if they were not to serve a greater purpose than that of being admired from Earth.
Huygens postulated that the great distance between the planets signified that God had not intended for beings on one to know about the beings on the others, and had not foreseen how much humans would advance in scientific knowledge. Huygens has been called the first theoretical physicist and a founder of modern mathematical physics. Although his influence was considerable during his lifetime, it began to fade shortly after his death.
For his work in physics, Huygens has been deemed one of the greatest scientists in the Scientific Revolution, rivaled only by Newton in both depth of insight and the number of results obtained. Huygens also helped develop the institutional frameworks for scientific research on the European continent , making him a leading actor in the establishment of modern science.
Spring-driven pendulum clock, designed by Huygens and built by Salomon Coster , with a copy of the Horologium Oscillatorium , at Museum Boerhaave, Leiden. Christiaan Huygens facts for kids Kids Encyclopedia Facts. Quick facts for kids. The Hague , Dutch Republic. Huygens's explanation for the aspects of Saturn, Systema Saturnium All content from Kiddle encyclopedia articles including the article images and facts can be freely used under Attribution-ShareAlike license, unless stated otherwise.