Astronomy Cast: Christiaan Huygens

Christiaan Huygens was a truly frightening intellect that basically got curious and just did stuff. So, he did advanced mathematics, where the only thing that seemed to limit him — he’s doing a lot of his mathematics work just a few years before Calculus was invented, so he tried to do things like calculate what is the shape of the hanging rope, and he couldn’t quite get there because you need Calculus. He did astronomy where he actually built all of his own lenses, and he devised new and better ways to grind and polish lenses. He was a physicist working to try and solve all sorts of interesting mechanics problems. He was also one of the people who worked on designing early clocks, where he didn’t build the clocks himself, he hired other people to do that, but he was the person who came up with the idea for the pendulum clock, and thought maybe that would be one of the ways to solve the latitude problem. He had the benefit of being the son of a mathematician who was friends with Rene Descartes, so growing up he had all of these amazing people constantly in and out of his life. He was also from a wealthy enough family that he had private tutors until he was sixteen. And he transitioned from private tutoring, which included Descartes looking over his shoulder, to then attending the University of Leiden, and then going on to the College of Orange in Breda. He studied mathematics, he studied Law — he was your quintessential “Renaissance man” in time and education. So he was born in 1629, went to university young, got involved on politics side of things before he actually turned to doing science actively. It was in 1657 that he did his first publication, which was in astronomy; it was in probability theory. In his life, he was mostly tied to different royal societies, so he kind of had royal backing. So back in the 1650s, he was grinding his own lenses; he was making his own telescopes, and as he’s making his observations, documenting day by day the changing alignment of the rings of Saturn…this is one of the most amazing things, is when Galileo looked at Saturn, he saw at one point it looked at one points like Saturn had a pair of handles.