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Christiaan Huygens Quotes

Christiaan Huygens , also spelled Huyghens, was a Dutch physicist, mathematician, astronomer and inventor, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time and a major figure in the scientific revolution. In physics, Huygens made groundbreaking contributions in optics and mechanics, while as an astronomer he is chiefly known for his studies of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan. As an inventor, he improved the design of the telescope with the invention of the Huygenian eyepiece. His most famous invention, however, was the pendulum clock in 1656, which was a breakthrough in timekeeping and became the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. Because he was the first to use mathematical formulae to describe the laws of physics, Huygens has been called the first theoretical physicist and the founder of mathematical physics.In 1659, Huygens was the first to derive the now standard formula for the centripetal force in his work De vi centrifuga. The formula played a central role in classical mechanics. Huygens was also the first to formulate the correct laws of elastic collision in his work De motu corporum ex percussione, but his findings were not published until 1703, after his death. In the field of optics, he is best known for his wave theory of light, which he proposed in 1678 and described in 1690 in his Treatise on Light, which is regarded as the first mathematical theory of light. His theory was initially rejected in favor of Isaac Newton's corpuscular theory of light, until Augustin-Jean Fresnel adopted Huygens' principle in 1818 and showed that it could explain the rectilinear propagation and diffraction effects of light. Today this principle is known as the Huygens–Fresnel principle.

Huygens invented the pendulum clock in 1656, which he patented the following year. In addition to this invention, his research in horology resulted in an extensive analysis of the pendulum in his 1673 book Horologium Oscillatorium, which is regarded as one of the most important 17th-century works in mechanics. While the first part of the book contains descriptions of clock designs, most of the book is an analysis of pendulum motion and a theory of curves. In 1655, Huygens began grinding lenses with his brother Constantijn in order to build telescopes to conduct astronomical research. He designed a 50-power refracting telescope with which he discovered that the ring of Saturn was "a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic." It was with this telescope that he also discovered the first of Saturn's moons, Titan. He eventually developed in 1662 what is now called the Huygenian eyepiece, a telescope with two lenses, which diminished the amount of dispersion.

As a mathematician, Huygens was a pioneer on probability and wrote his first treatise on probability theory in 1657 with the work Van Rekeningh in Spelen van Gluck. Frans van Schooten, who was the private tutor of Huygens, translated the work as De ratiociniis in ludo aleae . The work is a systematic treatise on probability and deals with games of chance and in particular the problem of points. The modern concept of probability grew out of the use of expectation values by Huygens and Blaise Pascal . Wikipedia  

✵ 14. April 1629 – 8. July 1695
Christiaan Huygens photo

Works

Horologium Oscillatorium
Horologium Oscillatorium
Christiaan Huygens
Treatise on Light
Treatise on Light
Christiaan Huygens
Christiaan Huygens: 16   quotes 1   like

Famous Christiaan Huygens Quotes

“Here we may mount from this dull Earth, and viewing it from on high, consider whether Nature has laid out all her Cost and Finery upon this small Speck of Dirt.”

Christiaan Huygens

Book 1, p. 10
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

“These Gentlemen must be told, that they take too much upon themselves when they pretend to appoint how far and no farther Men shall go in their Searches, and to set bounds to other Mens Industry; as if they knew the Marks that God has placed to Knowledge…”

Christiaan Huygens

Book 1, p. 8
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

“…the power of this line [the cycloid] to measure time.”

Christiaan Huygens book Horologium Oscillatorium

Horologium Oscillatorium (1673) as quoted by Joella G. Yoder, "Christiaan Huygens, Book on the Pendulum Clock" in Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics 1640-1940 ed., Ivor Grattan-Guinness (2005)

“A Man that is of Copernicus’s Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry’d round and enlighten’d by the Sun, like the rest of the Planets, cannot but sometimes think, that it’s not improbable that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, and perhaps their Inhabitants too as well as this Earth of ours…”

Christiaan Huygens

Book 1, p. 1
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

“There are many degrees of Probable, some nearer Truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our Judgment.”

Christiaan Huygens

Book 1, p. 10
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

“We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls Great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorned as Well as our own.”

Christiaan Huygens

Book 1, p. 11
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

Christiaan Huygens Quotes

“I do not mind at all that [Newton] is not a Cartesian provided he does not offer us suppositions like that of attraction.”

Christiaan Huygens

Letter to Fatio de Duillier (11 July 1687), quoted in René Dugas, Mechanics in the seventeenth century (1958), p. 440

“I esteem his [Newton's] understanding and subtlety highly, but I consider that they have been put to ill use in the greater part of this work, where the author studies things of little use or when he builds on the improbable principle of attraction.”

Christiaan Huygens

(1692) writing five years after the appearance of Newton's Principia, as quoted in A. R. Manwell, Mathematics Before Newton (Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 56 – «He [Huygens] said, indeed, that the idea of universal attraction [gravitation] 'appears to me absurd'.»

Understanding , Study , Parting

“One finds in this subject a kind of demonstration which does not carry with it so high a degree of certainty as that employed in geometry; and which differs distinctly from the method employed by geometers in that they prove their propositions by well-established and incontrovertible principles, while here principles are tested by inferences which are derivable from them. The nature of the subject permits of no other treatment. It is possible, however, in this way to establish a probability which is little short of certainty. This is the case when the consequences of the assumed principles are in perfect accord with the observed phenomena, and especially when these verifications are numerous; but above all when one employs the hypothesis to predict new phenomena and finds his expectations realized.”

Christiaan Huygens book Treatise on Light

Treatise on Light (1690) - preface, Translated by Michael R. Matthews, Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy. 1989. p. 126

Way , Nature , Perfection

“Since 'tis certain that Earth and Jupiter have their Water and Clouds, there is no reason why the other Planets should be without them. I can't say that they are exactly of the same nature with our Water; but that they should be liquid their use requires, as their beauty does that they be clear. This Water of ours, in Jupiter or Saturn, would be frozen up instantly by reason of the vast distance of the Sun. Every Planet therefore must have its own Waters of such a temper not liable to Frost.”

Christiaan Huygens

Book I http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/huygens/huygens_ct_en.htm, p. 27
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

Beauty , Nature , Water , Sun

“I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.”

Christiaan Huygens

Letter to Pierre Perrault, 'Sur la préface de M. Perrault de son traité de l'Origine des fontaines' (1673), Oeuvres Complètes de Christiaan Huygens http://books.google.com/books?id=9IVA7sK_Bh8C (1897), Vol. 7, 298. Quoted in Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, ed. Keith R. Benson and trans. Robert Ellrich (1997), 163

“Now since in so many Things they… agree, what can be more probable than that in others they agree too; and that the other Planets are as beautiful and as well stock'd with Inhabitants as the Earth? Or what shadow of Reason can there be why they should not?”

Christiaan Huygens

Book 1, p. 18
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

Beauty

“I had not thought of this regular decrease of gravity, namely that it is as the inverse square of the distance; this is a new and highly remarkable property of gravity.”

Christiaan Huygens

(1691) quoted in Popular Astronomy, Vol. 56 (1948), pp. 189–190.

“It's evident God had no design to make a particular Enumeration in the Holy Scriptures, of all the Works of his Creation.”

Christiaan Huygens

Book 1, p. 7
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

God

“What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our wonder and admiration be encreased when we consider the prodigious distance and multitude of the Stars?”

Christiaan Huygens

Quam mirabilis igitur, quamque stupenda mundi amplitudo, & magnificentia jam mente concipienda est. Tot Soles, tot Terrae atque harum unaquaeque tot herbis, arboribus, animalibus, tot maribus, montibusque exornata. Et erit etiam unde augeatur admiratio, si quis ea quae de fixarum Stellarum distantia, & multitudine hisce addimus, pependerit.
Book 2 http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/huygens/huygens_ct_en.htm, pp. 150-151
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

Mountain , Star , Tree , Universe

“The world is my country, to promote science is my religion.”

Christiaan Huygens

The earliest found citation is in K.O. Meinsma, Spinoza en zijn kring. Historisch-kritische studiën over Hollandsche vrijgeesten (Martinus Nijhoff, 's-Gravenhage, 1896). This influential study was translated in French and German, but not in English. In the original Dutch context it seems as though this is not a quote from Huygens, but a characterisation by the author (Meinsma) of what 'could haven been' Huygens' devise.
In Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (Episode 6) from 1980 it is phrased The world is my country, science my religion.
Also in The Making of Modern Europe, 1648-1780 (1985) by Geoffrey Treasure, p. 474, it is declared that this was Huygens' "motto" — but this seems very similar to the much more famous and long attested declaration of Thomas Paine in Rights of Man (1791): "My country is the world, and my religion is to do good" which has long been paraphrased "The world is my country, and to do good is my religion."
Disputed

World , Religion , Science , Country

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