Christian Huygens
Cód:
491_9781443729161
CHRISTIAN HUYGENS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY By A. E. BELL. PREFACE: THERE can be no doubt that Christian Huygens was one of the greatest scientific geniuses of all time. A man who transformed the telescope from being a toy into a powerful instrument of in vestigation, and this as a consequence of profound optical researches; who discovered Saturns ring and the satellite Titan; who drew attention to the Nebula in Orion; who studied the prob lem of gravity in a quantitative manner, arriving at correct ideas about the effects of centrifugal force and the shape of the earth; who, in the great work Horologium Oscillatorium, founded the dynamics of systems and cleared up the whole subject of the compound pendulum and the tautochrone; who solved the out standing problems concerned with collision of elastic bodies and out of much intractable work developed the general notion of energy and work; who is rightly regarded as the founder of the wave theory in light, and thus of physical optics such a man deserves memory with the names of Galileo and Newton, and only the accidents of history have so far prevented this. It might be argued that Robert Hooke, who like Huygens was influenced by Descartes s teachings, is of equal stature and showed as much inventive genius and intuition. In the extraordinary range of their activities there is some similarity. The overwhelming difference lies in the fact that Huygens was a great mathema tician and exponent of the quantitative method, whereas Hooke could never get beyond the first phase of a piece of work : that which led to the need of exact measurement and the discovery of mathematical relations. Having made this claim for Huygens, it is natural to ask how he compares with Newton. It is a question which arises from time to time in these pages, and one to which there is no epigrammatic answer. In some senses it was Huygenss greatest misfortune to grow up under the powerful influence of Descartes, who
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