Considering his upbringing, it is perhaps no surprise that Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) became one of Europe’s greatest scientists. His father, a Dutch diplomat, was a personal friend of the French mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650), who frequently visited their home in The Hague and tutored the young Huygens. Another family friend, the mathematician Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), was in the habit of mailing puzzles to the precocious scholar.
By age twenty-six, Huygens had already graduated from the University of Leiden and made his most famous astronomical find. Using the most technologically advanced telescope in Europe, whose lenses he had made himself, Huygens discovered that Saturn had a moon, Titan. He was also the first to correctly infer that the planet had rings; earlier observers had been stumped by what appeared to be the planet’s bulging sides.
Encouraged by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), Huygens also wrote the first work on probability theory—in the guise of a gambling manual. Published in 1657, the book was later published in English as The Value of All Chances in Games of Fortune; Cards, Dice, Wagers, Lotteries, etc. Mathematically Demonstrated.
In 1666, Huygens moved to Paris, where he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences. However, as a Protestant, he was barred from France when the king revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, ending a period of religious toleration in the predominantly Roman Catholic country.
Huygens then visited England, where he clashed with the English mathematician Isaac Newton (1643–1727). Newton’s theory of gravitation, Huygens wrote, “appears to me absurd.” The two scientists also disagreed about the nature of light, but in that controversy it was Huygens who was eventually vindicated. Huygens believed light was a wave—a view confirmed by modern physicists—while Newton thought light was composed of tiny particles called corpuscles.
After suffering a chronic illness, Huygens died in the Netherlands at age sixty-six.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Huygens’s father was an early patron of the Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606–1669), but had a falling-out with the artist after Rembrandt delivered a few religious paintings that the elder Huygens found lacking.
- After Huygens discovered Saturn’s moon, he initially shared the news with other astronomers using a coded anagram in Latin. To decode the anagram, the recipient needed to rearrange a quote from Ovid into Huygens’s secret message: “A moon revolves around Saturn in sixteen days four hours.”
- When he discovered Saturn’s moon, Huygens called it simply Luna Saturni—Latin for “Saturn’s moon.” The British astronomer John Herschel (1792–1871) dubbed it Titan after the Titans, figures in Greek mythology.
