---
title: "History of physics"
chunk: 6/16
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:08.451736+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The Dutch physicist, mathematician, astronomer and inventor Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) was the leading scientist in Europe between Galileo and Newton. Huygens came from a family of nobility that had an important position in the Dutch society of the 17th century; a time in which the Dutch Republic flourished economically and culturally. This period – roughly between 1588 and 1702 – of the history of the Netherlands is also referred to as the Dutch Golden Age, an era during the Scientific Revolution when Dutch science was among the most acclaimed in Europe. At this time, intellectuals and scientists like René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, John Locke and Hugo Grotius resided in the Netherlands. It was in this intellectual environment that Christiaan Huygens grew up. Christiaan's father, Constantijn Huygens, was, apart from an important poet, the secretary and diplomat for the Princes of Orange. He knew many scientists of his time because of his contacts and intellectual interests, including René Descartes and Marin Mersenne, and it was because of these contacts that Christiaan Huygens became aware of their work, especially Descartes, whose mechanistic philosophy was going to have a huge influence on Huygens' own work. Descartes was later impressed by the skills Huygens showed in geometry, as was Mersenne, who christened him "the new Archimedes" (which led Constantijn to refer to his son as "my little Archimedes").
A child prodigy, Huygens began his correspondence with Marin Mersenne when he was 17 years old. Huygens became interested in games of chance when he encountered the work of Fermat, Blaise Pascal and Girard Desargues. It was Pascal who encouraged him to write Van Rekeningh in Spelen van Gluck, which Frans van Schooten translated and published as De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae in 1657. The book is the earliest known scientific treatment of the subject, and at the time the most coherent presentation of a mathematical approach to games of chance. Two years later Huygens derived geometrically the now standard formulae in classical mechanics for the centripetal- and centrifugal force in his work De vi Centrifuga (1659). Around the same time Huygens' research in horology resulted in the invention of the pendulum clock; a breakthrough in timekeeping and the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. The theoretical research of the way the pendulum works eventually led to the publication of one of his most important achievements: the Horologium Oscillatorium. This work was published in 1673 and became one of the three most important 17th century works on mechanics (the other two being Galileo's Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (1638) and Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)). The Horologium Oscillatorium is the first modern treatise in which a physical problem (the accelerated motion of a falling body) is idealized by a set of parameters then analyzed mathematically and constitutes one of the seminal works of applied mathematics. It is for this reason, Huygens has been called the first theoretical physicist and one of the founders of modern mathematical physics. Huygens' Horologium Oscillatorium influenced the work of Isaac Newton, who admired the work. For instance, the laws Huygens described in the Horologium Oscillatorium are structurally the same as Newton's first two laws of motion.
Five years after the publication of his Horologium Oscillatorium, Huygens described his wave theory of light. Though proposed in 1678, it was not published until 1690 in his Traité de la Lumière. His mathematical theory of light was initially rejected in favour of Newton's corpuscular theory of light, until Augustin-Jean Fresnel adopted Huygens' principle to give a complete explanation of the rectilinear propagation and diffraction effects of light in 1821. Today this principle is known as the Huygens–Fresnel principle.
As an astronomer, Huygens began grinding lenses with his brother Constantijn Jr. to build telescopes for astronomical research. He was the first to identify the rings of Saturn as "a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic," and discovered the first of Saturn's moons, Titan, using a refracting telescope.
Huygens was also the first who brought mathematical rigor to the description of physical phenomena. Because of this, and the fact that he developed institutional frameworks for scientific research on the continent, he has been referred to as "the leading actor in 'the making of science in Europe'"

=== Isaac Newton ===

Cambridge University physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was a fellow of the Royal Society of England, who created a single system for describing the workings of the universe. Newton formulated three laws of motion which formulated the relationship between motion and objects and also the law of universal gravitation, the latter of which could be used to explain the behavior not only of falling bodies on the earth but also planets and other celestial bodies. To arrive at his results, Newton invented one form of an entirely new branch of mathematics: calculus (also invented independently by Gottfried Leibniz), which was to become an essential tool in much of the later development in most branches of physics. Newton's findings were set forth in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), the publication of which in 1687 marked the beginning of the modern period of mechanics and astronomy.
Newton refuted the Cartesian mechanical tradition that all motions should be explained with respect to the immediate force exerted by corpuscles. Using his three laws of motion and law of universal gravitation, Newton removed the idea that objects followed paths determined by natural shapes and instead demonstrated that all the future motions of any body could be deduced mathematically based on knowledge of their existing motion, their mass, and the forces acting upon them. However, observed celestial motions did not precisely conform to a Newtonian treatment, and Newton, who was also deeply interested in theology, imagined that God intervened to ensure the continued stability of the solar system.