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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Huygens Christian Zuylichen von. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
Christian Huygens von Zuylichen - the son of the Dutch nobleman Constantine Huygens, was born on April 14, 1629. "Talents, nobility and wealth were, apparently, hereditary in the family of Christian Huygens," wrote one of his biographers. His grandfather was a writer and dignitary, his father was a secret adviser to the princes of Orange, a mathematician, and a poet. Faithful service to their sovereigns did not enslave their talents, and it seemed that Christian was destined for the same enviable fate for many. He studied arithmetic and Latin, music and versification. Heinrich Bruno, his teacher, could not get enough of his fourteen-year-old pupil: "I confess that Christian must be called a miracle among boys ... He deploys his abilities in the field of mechanics and construction, makes amazing machines, but hardly necessary." The teacher was wrong: the boy is always looking for the benefits of his studies. His concrete, practical mind will soon find schemes of machines that people really need. However, he did not immediately devote himself to mechanics and mathematics. The father decided to make his son a lawyer and, when Christian reached the age of sixteen, he sent him to study law at the University of London. Being engaged in legal sciences at the university, Huygens at the same time is fond of mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, and practical optics. A skilled craftsman, he grinds optical glasses on his own and improves the pipe, with the help of which he will later make his astronomical discoveries. Christian Huygens was Galileo's immediate successor in science. According to Lagrange, Huygens "was destined to improve and develop the most important discoveries of Galileo." There is a story about how for the first time Huygens came into contact with the ideas of Galileo. Seventeen-year-old Huygens was going to prove that bodies thrown horizontally move along parabolas, but, having found the proof in the book of Galileo, he did not want to "write the Iliad after Homer." After graduating from the university, he becomes an adornment of the retinue of the Count of Nassau, who, on a diplomatic mission, is on his way to Denmark. The count is not interested in the fact that this handsome young man is the author of curious mathematical works, and he, of course, does not know how Christian dreams of getting from Copenhagen to Stockholm to see Descartes. So they will never meet: in a few months Descartes will die. At the age of 22, Huygens published Discourses on the Square of the Hyperbola, Ellipse, and Circle. In 1655, he builds a telescope and discovers one of Saturn's satellites, Titan, and publishes New Discoveries in the Size of a Circle. At the age of 26, Christian writes notes on dioptrics. At the age of 28, his treatise "On Calculations when Playing Dice" was published, where one of the first ever research in the field of probability theory is hidden behind a seemingly frivolous title. One of Huygens' most important discoveries was the invention of the pendulum clock. He patented his invention on July 16, 1657 and described it in a short essay published in 1658. He wrote about his watch to the French king Louis XIV: "My automata, placed in your apartments, not only amaze you every day with the correct indication of time, but they are suitable, as I hoped from the very beginning, for determining the longitude of a place on the sea." Christian Huygens was engaged in the task of creating and improving clocks, especially pendulum clocks, for almost forty years: from 1656 to 1693. A. Sommerfeld called Huygens "the most brilliant watchmaker of all time". At thirty, Huygens reveals the secret of Saturn's ring. The rings of Saturn were first noticed by Galileo as two lateral appendages "supporting" Saturn. Then the rings were visible, like a thin line, he did not notice them and did not mention them again. But Galileo's pipe did not have the necessary resolution and sufficient magnification. Watching the sky with a 92x telescope, Christian discovers that the ring of Saturn was taken as side stars. Huygens solved the riddle of Saturn and for the first time described its famous rings. At that time Huygens was a very handsome young man with large blue eyes and a neatly trimmed mustache. The reddish curls of the wig, coolly curled in the fashion of the time, fell to the shoulders, lying on the snow-white Brabant lace of an expensive collar. He was friendly and calm. No one saw him especially excited or confused, in a hurry somewhere, or, on the contrary, immersed in slow thoughtfulness. He did not like to be in the “light” and rarely appeared there, although his origin opened the doors of all the palaces of Europe to him. However, when he appeared there, he did not look at all awkward or embarrassed, as often happened to other scientists. But in vain the charming Ninon de Lanclos seeks his company, he is invariably friendly, no more, this convinced bachelor. He can drink with friends, but not much. Sneak a little, laugh a little. A little bit of everything, a very little bit, so that as much time as possible is left for the main thing - work. Work - an unchanging all-consuming passion - burned him constantly. Huygens was distinguished by extraordinary dedication. He was aware of his abilities and sought to use them to the fullest. “The only entertainment that Huygens allowed himself in such abstract works,” one of his contemporaries wrote about him, “was that he was engaged in physics in between. What was a tedious task for an ordinary person was entertainment for Huygens.” In 1663 Huygens was elected a member of the Royal Society of London. In 1665, at the invitation of Colbert, he settled in Paris and the following year became a member of the newly organized Paris Academy of Sciences. In 1673, his work "Pendulum Clock" was published, where the theoretical foundations of Huygens' invention were given. In this work, Huygens establishes that the cycloid has the property of isochronism, and analyzes the mathematical properties of the cycloid. Investigating the curvilinear motion of a heavy point, Huygens, continuing to develop the ideas expressed by Galileo, shows that a body, when falling from a certain height along various paths, acquires a finite velocity that does not depend on the shape of the path, but depends only on the height of the fall, and can rise to a height equal (in the absence of resistance) to the initial height. This proposition, which essentially expresses the law of conservation of energy for motion in a gravitational field, is used by Huygens for the theory of the physical pendulum. He finds an expression for the reduced length of the pendulum, establishes the concept of the swing center and its properties. He expresses the formula of a mathematical pendulum for cycloidal motion and small oscillations of a circular pendulum as follows: "The time of one small oscillation of a circular pendulum is related to the time of falling along the double length of the pendulum, as the circumference of a circle is related to the diameter." It is significant that at the end of his essay the scientist gives a number of proposals (without a conclusion) about the centripetal force and establishes that the centripetal acceleration is proportional to the square of the speed and inversely proportional to the radius of the circle. This result prepared the Newtonian theory of the motion of bodies under the action of central forces. From the mechanical research of Huygens, in addition to the theory of the pendulum and centripetal force, his theory of the impact of elastic balls is known, which he presented for a competitive task announced by the Royal Society of London in 1668. Huygens' impact theory is based on the law of conservation of living forces, momentum and Galileo's principle of relativity. It was not published until after his death in 1703. Huygens traveled quite a lot, but he was never an idle tourist. During the first trip to France, he studied optics, and in London he explained the secrets of making his telescopes. Fifteen years he worked at the court of Louis XIV, fifteen years of brilliant mathematical and physical research. And in fifteen years - only two short trips to his homeland to heal. Huygens lived in Paris until 1681, when, after the repeal of the Edict of Nantes, he, as a Protestant, returned to his homeland. While in Paris, he knew Roemer well and actively helped him in the observations that led to the determination of the speed of light. Huygens was the first to report Roemer's results in his treatise. At home, in Holland, again not knowing fatigue, Huygens builds a mechanical planetarium, giant seventy-meter telescopes, describes the worlds of other planets. Huygens' work in Latin appears on light, corrected by the author and republished in French in 1690. Huygens' "Treatise on Light" entered the history of science as the first scientific work on wave optics. This "Treatise" formulated the principle of wave propagation, now known as Huygens' principle. Based on this principle, the laws of reflection and refraction of light were derived, and the theory of double refraction in Icelandic spar was developed. Since the speed of propagation of light in a crystal is different in different directions, the shape of the wave surface will not be spherical, but ellipsoidal. The theory of propagation and refraction of light in uniaxial crystals is a remarkable achievement of Huygens' optics. Huygens also described the disappearance of one of the two rays when they pass through the second crystal with a certain orientation of it relative to the first. Thus, Huygens was the first physicist to establish the fact of light polarization. Huygens' ideas were highly valued by his successor Fresnel. He ranked them above all discoveries in Newton's optics, arguing that Huygens' discovery "is perhaps more difficult to make than all Newton's discoveries in the field of light phenomena." Huygens does not consider colors in his treatise, as well as the diffraction of light. His treatise is devoted only to the justification of reflection and refraction (including double refraction) from the wave point of view. This circumstance was probably the reason why Huygens' theory, despite its support in the XNUMXth century by Lomonosov and Euler, did not receive recognition until Fresnel resurrected the wave theory on a new basis in the early XNUMXth century. Huygens died on July 8, 1695, when Kosmoteoros, his last book, was being printed in the printing house. Author: Samin D.K.
▪ Huygens Christian. Biography ▪ Butlerov Alexander. Biography
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