DThis winter one wears mouse-gray fabrics and white flounces tied around the calves, albeit a bit narrower than before: Christiaan Huygens had barely returned from The Hague to Paris in October 1660 when he plunged into social life, it had to be the latest fashion , plus a sedan chair, that was expensive, but still cheaper than a carriage, and “walking is simply impossible”.
It is not easy to do justice to the physicist, astronomer, mathematician, inventor, musician, diplomat and science manager Christiaan Huygens, who was born in 1629. On the threshold of modern science, he stands between theory and handicraft, court duties and nights at the telescope – a Mercury transit interested him more than the coronation celebrations of Charles II. He tries to exchange knowledge in Europe and yet has to constantly between juggle the nationalisms of England, France and the Netherlands. As his biographer, the journalist and curator Hugh Aldersey-Williams, writes, he is the greatest natural scientist in Europe between Galileo and Newton, and yet hardly known to a larger audience.
No seamless heroic story
With his new book, Aldersey-Williams has brought the polymath Huygens onto the stage. The researcher’s well-connected family plays a major role in his story, especially his father, secretary to the governor of the Netherlands, who arranges contacts and opens doors for him, and his older brother, who is a full-time diplomat and also a little researcher. Newton did not appear until Huygens had long been recognized as the great master of mathematics, astronomy and optics.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams: “The waves of light”. Christiaan Huygens and the Invention of Modern Science.
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Image: Hanser Verlag
Reluctantly and questioningly, the author brings another dimension into play: Huygens’ relationship to his homeland, the Netherlands, with the wide view that the flat land allows, the light that is gentler than the Italian, and the sand of the Dunes, an indispensable raw material for lens grinders. How strong these influences were is of course difficult to say, and the author has to leave it open in the end.
Fever, headache and “sadness”
Aldersey-Williams is careful not to present a seamless heroic story. On the one hand, the mess that Huygens creates himself by working on various projects at the same time speaks against it: on astronomical observations that let him discover the rings of Saturn and one of its moons, on the theory of probability, on lenses for better microscopes and telescopes, a vacuum pump, a magic lantern, water features and again and again a pendulum clock mechanism that should be robust and precise enough to finally be able to determine the longitude of your own position on ships. At the same time he finds time for music and music theory, drawings about drawings, one or two poems and a book about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
On the other hand, there are the “circumstances” that don’t make it any easier: Huygens repeatedly moves his residence back and forth between his home, Paris and London, invests a lot of energy in disputes about who they are, especially because of the watches Invention succeeded, and at the same time tries to organize the exchange between researchers whose countries are at war with each other. After all, Huygens’ health is not in the best of conditions either: fever, headache and “sadness” are his recurring companions.
Researchers had to be resourceful craftsmen
In order to do justice to all of this, the chapters are organized roughly chronologically, but above all in terms of content, according to the discoveries and inventions that Huygens came up with, the feuds and processes through which he fought, the women he campaigned for, without ever to marry, and the role music played in his life – the father had found the standard schooling to be inadequate and had made sure that his children were also taught by musicians and painters.
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