Dutch Light: Christiaan Huygens and the Making of Science in Europe

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

Overview

Hugh Aldersey-Williams transports us to the Dutch Golden Age - a time of immense scientific and artistic innovation - in this histo-biography of Christiaan Huygens, one of Europe's leading, yet unsung, thinkers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781509893355
Publisher:	Pan Macmillan
Publication date:	01/01/2022
Pages:	560
Sales rank:	1,094,497
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 7.76(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Hugh Aldersey-Williams studied natural sciences at Cambridge. He is the author of Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements from Arsenic to Zinc, Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body, and Tide: The Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth

Table of Contents

List of illustrations ix

Author's note xvii

Map xix

The Huygens family xx

Introduction 1

1 Sand, Light, Glass 19

2 The Kenner of All Things 43

3 Encounters with Genius 63

4 At Home 93

5 Almost a Prodigy 117

6 Reversals and Collisions 133

7 Saturn 169

8 Time and Chance 195

9 Scientific Society 225

10 New Music 247

11 The Parisian 265

12 Science During Wartime 299

13 Feuds and Trials 323

14 Light and Gravity 359

15 Other Worlds 389

Afterword 417

Main personalities 433

Acknowledgements 445

Notes 451

Bibliography 489

Index 507

Editorial Reviews

This book, soaked like the Dutch Republic itself 'in ink and paint', is enchanting to the point of escapism . . . One of the best things about this absorbing book (and how many 500-page biographies feel too short when you finish them?) is the interest it shows in everyone else. — Simon Ings ― Spectator

Hugh Aldersey-Williams rescues his subject from Newton's shadow, where he was been unjustly confined for other three hundred years . . . a fresh and absorbing vision of 17th-century experimentation that sheds welcome light on wider European culture. ― Literary Review

Hugh Aldersey-Williams reclaims the 17th-century polymath Christiaan Huygens from relative obscurity in an excellent biography that is also a story about the birth of modern science. Among other things, Huygens invented the mechanism for the pendulum clock and discovered the rings of Saturn through a telescope he had invented. — Ruth Scurr ― Spectator 'Books of the year'

Fascinating . . . an impressive piece of scholarship. I learned a lot — John Gribbin, author of Six Impossible Things and In Search of Schrödinger's Cat

"Fresh [and] revelatory." New York Times Book Review on Anatomies

"Not so much an attempt to make sense of the body as an attempt to make sense of all the ways we’ve ever tried to make sense of it…A massive cocktail-party primer filled with anecdotal pearls." ―Leslie Jamison, New Republic on Anatomies

“Aldersey-Williams’s playful, hands-on approach to scientific exploration shines through the book.” — Boston Globe on Periodic Tales

From the Publisher