Christiaan Huygens (1629-95): astronomer and mechanician

摘要

One of the enduring legacies of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution was the realization that the natural world was neither so simple nor so straightforward as it appeared to our unaided senses. The microscope, barometer and air pump had shown that new levels of reality could be revealed by specialized instruments, and nowhere was the power of instruments more clearly demonstrated than in the science of astronomy. For as soon as Galileo's telescope came to reveal Jupiter's moons and the stars of the Milky Way in 1609, it implied that the heavens might contain yet further surprises, undreamt of by Ptolemy, or even Tycho Brahe, if only the clarity of human vision could be strengthened. Much of Christiaan Huygens' scientific career went towards accomplishing that task, for he belonged to that early generation of scientists who recognized the relationship that existed between technology, mathematics and new ideas, and saw instrumental research as an avenue leading to new breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe. These instruments, moreover, were not like the simple yardsticks and balances of traditional reckoning, but devices which exploited the newly discovered physical properties of nature: the laws of optics, applied trigonometry, and the application of physical principles to the design of machines.