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Treatise on Light
Publisher: Macmillan And Company., Limited Publication date: 1912
Subjects: NATURAL SCIENCES
Subjects: NATURAL SCIENCES
Physics
Electricity. Magnetism. Electromagnetism Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.
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108 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1690
About the author
Christiaan Huygens
136 books43 followersChristiaan Huygens, FRS (/ˈhaɪɡənz/ or /ˈhɔɪɡənz/; Dutch: [ˈɦœy̆ɣə(n)s] (Latin: Hugenius) (14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695) was a prominent Dutch mathematician and scientist. He is known particularly as an astronomer, physicist, probabilist and horologist.
Huygens was a leading scientist of his time. 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. He published major studies of mechanics and optics, and a pioneer work on games of chance.
Christiaan Huygens was born on 14 April 1629 in The Hague, into a rich and influential Dutch family, the second son of Constantijn Huygens. Christiaan was named after his paternal grandfather. His mother was Suzanna van Baerle. She died in 1637, shortly after the birth of Huygens' sister. The couple had five children: Constantijn (1628), Christiaan (1629), Lodewijk (1631), Philips (1632) and Suzanna (1637).
Constantijn Huygens was a diplomat and advisor to the House of Orange, and also a poet and musician. His friends included Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne and René Descartes. Huygens was educated at home until turning sixteen years old. He liked to play with miniatures of mills and other machines. His father gave him a liberal education: he studied languages and music, history and geography, mathematics, logic and rhetoric, but also dancing, fencing and horse riding.
In 1644 Huygens had as his mathematical tutor Jan Jansz de Jonge Stampioen, who set the 15-year-old a demanding reading list on contemporary science. Descartes was impressed by his skills in geometry.
Shortly before his death in 1695, Huygens completed Cosmotheoros, published posthumously in 1698. In it he speculated on the existence of extraterrestrial life, on other planets, which he imagined was similar to that on Earth.
Such speculations were not uncommon at the time, justified by Copernicanism or the plenitude principle. But Huygens went into greater detail. The work, translated into English in its year of publication, has been seen as in the fanciful tradition of Francis Godwin, John Wilkins and Cyrano de Bergerac, and fundamentally Utopian; and also to owe in its concept of planet to cosmography in the sense of Peter Heylin.
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.
It was also in this book that Huygens published his method for estimating stellar distances. He made a series of smaller holes in a screen facing the sun, until he estimated the light was of the same intensity as that of the star Sirius. He then calculated that the angle of this hole was 1/27,664th the diameter of the Sun, and thus it was about 30,000 times as far away, on the (incorrect) assumption that Sirius is as bright our sun. The subject of photometry remained in its infancy until Pierre Bouguer and Johann Heinrich Lambert.
Huygens was a leading scientist of his time. 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. He published major studies of mechanics and optics, and a pioneer work on games of chance.
Christiaan Huygens was born on 14 April 1629 in The Hague, into a rich and influential Dutch family, the second son of Constantijn Huygens. Christiaan was named after his paternal grandfather. His mother was Suzanna van Baerle. She died in 1637, shortly after the birth of Huygens' sister. The couple had five children: Constantijn (1628), Christiaan (1629), Lodewijk (1631), Philips (1632) and Suzanna (1637).
Constantijn Huygens was a diplomat and advisor to the House of Orange, and also a poet and musician. His friends included Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne and René Descartes. Huygens was educated at home until turning sixteen years old. He liked to play with miniatures of mills and other machines. His father gave him a liberal education: he studied languages and music, history and geography, mathematics, logic and rhetoric, but also dancing, fencing and horse riding.
In 1644 Huygens had as his mathematical tutor Jan Jansz de Jonge Stampioen, who set the 15-year-old a demanding reading list on contemporary science. Descartes was impressed by his skills in geometry.
Shortly before his death in 1695, Huygens completed Cosmotheoros, published posthumously in 1698. In it he speculated on the existence of extraterrestrial life, on other planets, which he imagined was similar to that on Earth.
Such speculations were not uncommon at the time, justified by Copernicanism or the plenitude principle. But Huygens went into greater detail. The work, translated into English in its year of publication, has been seen as in the fanciful tradition of Francis Godwin, John Wilkins and Cyrano de Bergerac, and fundamentally Utopian; and also to owe in its concept of planet to cosmography in the sense of Peter Heylin.
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.
It was also in this book that Huygens published his method for estimating stellar distances. He made a series of smaller holes in a screen facing the sun, until he estimated the light was of the same intensity as that of the star Sirius. He then calculated that the angle of this hole was 1/27,664th the diameter of the Sun, and thus it was about 30,000 times as far away, on the (incorrect) assumption that Sirius is as bright our sun. The subject of photometry remained in its infancy until Pierre Bouguer and Johann Heinrich Lambert.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 7, 2019
But sound, as I have said above, only travels 180 toises in the same time of one second: hence the velocity of light is more than six hundred thousand times greater than that of sound.
This little treatise is included in volume 34 of the Great Books of the Western World, which I used to read Newton’s Principia and his Opticks. In this edition the Treatise comes out to about 50 pages, so I decided it was worth combing through. Christiaan Huygens is one of the relatively lesser known figures of the scientific revolution. But even a brief acquaintance with his life and work is enough to convince one that he was a thinker of gigantic proportion, in a league with Descartes and Leibniz. His work in mechanics prefigured Newton’s laws, and his detailed understanding of the physics of pendulums (building from Galileo’s work) allowed him to invent the pendulum clock. His knowledge of optics also improved the technology of telescope lenses, which in turn allowed him to describe the rings of Saturn and discover the first of Saturn’s moons, Titan.
Apart from all this, Huygens was the progenitor of the wave theory of light. This is in contrast with the corpuscular theory of light (in which light is conceived of as little particles), put forward 14 years later in Isaac Newton’s Opticks. Newton’s theory quickly became more popular, partially because of its inherent strength, and partially because it was Isaac Newton who proposed it. But Huygens’s wave theory was revived and seemingly confirmed in the 19th century by Thomas Young and Augustin-Jean Fresnel.
Essentially, Huygens's idea was to use sound as an analogy for light. Just as sound consists of longitudinal waves (vibrating in the direction they travel) propagated by air, so light must consist of much faster waves propagated by some other, finer medium, which Huygens calls the ether. He conceives of a luminous object, such as a burning coal, as emitting circular waves at every point in its surface, spreading in every direction throughout a space.
Like Newton, Huygens was aware of Ole Rømer’s calculation of the speed of light. It had long been debated whether light is instantaneous or merely moves very quickly. Aristotle rejected the second option, thinking it inconceivable that something could move so fast. Little progress had been made since then, because making a determination of light’s speed presents serious challenges: not only is light several orders of magnitude faster than anything in our experience, but since light is the fastest thing there is, and the bearer of our information, we have nothing to measure it against.
This changed once astronomers began measuring the movement of the Jovian moons. Specifically, the moon Io is eclipsed by Jupiter every 42.5 hours; but as Rømer measured this cycle at different points in the year, he noticed that it varied somewhat. Realizing that this likely wasn’t due to the moon’s orbit itself, he hypothesized that it was caused by the varying distance of Earth to Jupiter, and he used this as the basis for the first roughly accurate calculation of the speed of light. Newton and Huygens both accepted the principle and refined the results.
Huygens gets through his wave theory, reflection, and refraction fairly quickly; and in fact the bulk of this book is dedicated to an analysis of Icelandic spar—or, as Huygens calls it, “The Strange Refraction of Icelandic Crystal.” This is a type of crystal that is distinctive for its birefringence, which means that it refracts light of different polarizations at different angles, causing a kind of double image to appear through the crystal. Huygens delves into a detailed geometrical analysis of the crystal, which I admit I could not follow in the least; nevertheless, the defining property of polarization eludes him, since to understand it one must conceive of light as a transverse, not a longitudinal, wave (that is, unlike a sound wave, which cannot be polarized). In the end, he leaves this puzzling property of the crystal for future scientists, but not without laying the groundwork of observation and theory that we still rely upon.
All together, this little treatise is a deeply impressive work of science: combining sophisticated mathematical modeling with careful experimentation to reach surprising new conclusions. Huygens illustrates perfectly the rare mix of gifts that a scientist must have in order to be successful: a sharp logical mind, careful attention to detail, and a creative imagination. The world is full of those with only one or two of these qualities—brilliant mathematicians with no interest in the real world, obsessive recorders and cataloguers with no imagination, brilliant artists with no gift for logic—but it takes the combination to make a scientist of the caliber of Huygens.
November 11, 2021
I like this guy.
Modest and humble and inquisitive. He explains pretty abstract concepts in a decently understandable manner.
I liked substituting “truth” for “light” and came up with some pretty profound statements.
“I would believe then that those who love to know the Causes of things and who are able to admire the marvels of Light, will find some satisfaction in these various speculations regarding it.”
Modest and humble and inquisitive. He explains pretty abstract concepts in a decently understandable manner.
I liked substituting “truth” for “light” and came up with some pretty profound statements.
“I would believe then that those who love to know the Causes of things and who are able to admire the marvels of Light, will find some satisfaction in these various speculations regarding it.”
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July 4, 2013I understood Huygens when he was presenting his argument that light travels in waves at a defined speed, but then he thought he should prove it and he lost me. His geometric proofs describing the differences in refraction are probably something geometers rave over, but I couldn’t appreciate it. Which is most of the book. Another book I’m not remotely qualified to rate.
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October 31, 2013A nice impression of the properties of light are narrated in this book. the facts are backed by geometric explanations as well.
March 30, 2017
Text was easy to understand but the geometric proofs were less so. I'd never before heard of the properties of Icelandic crystal. The OCR process results in too many typos and illegible characters. Recommend you consider a better edition.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews