Huygens A Scientist Among the Philosophers

Hugh Aldersey-Williams traces the philosophical connections of a polymath.

- Hugh Aldersey-Williams

When the Dutch astronomer and physicist Christiaan Huygens died in 1695 at the age of sixtysix, the German philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz called his loss ‘inestimable’, and hailed him as the equal of Galileo and Descartes. “Helped by what they have done,” Leibniz wrote, “he has surpassed their discoveries. He is one of the prime ornaments of the age.” Indeed, Huygens discovered the rings around Saturn and detected the first moon of that planet. He also created the first accurate pendulum clock, among many other inventions. He described centrifugal force, was the first to employ mathematical formulae in the solution of problems in physics, and devised a foresighted wave-based theory of light. It is largely thanks to his contemporary Isaac Newton that we have mostly overlooked his achievements today. Newton habitually failed to acknowledge the contribution others had made to his discoveries, and Huygens was among those to suffer this fate. This, together with the cult of Newton’s ‘genius’ that grew up during the eighteenth century, ensured that the Englishman’s flawed ‘corpuscular’ theory of light prevailed over Huygens’ version, to the detriment of progress in optics for the next century, since, in contrast to Newtons’ theory, Huygens’ wave theory was substantially correct.