Christian Huygens: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Cosmos
The birth of this wonderful genius of science, who is remembered in history as the inventor of pendulum clocks and the theory of light, took place on April 14, 1629, in The Hague, the capital of the Netherlands. Huygens • Father Constantine Huygens was a well-known man of the fraternity and a poet, politician, musician and famous wrestler. Since childhood, Christian had a special interest in mathematics and science. He was educated at the universities of Leiden and Breda. When some of his essays related to mathematics and planetary calculations were published at the tender age of 22, even the famous philosopher René Descartes was astonished to read them.
In that era, astrology is considered to be the center point of the entire scientific world. Hughes has worked in that as well. The use of telescope had started now, but Huygens was not satisfied with the instruments available in those days. As a result, Huygens started making personal lenses. His assistant in this work would have been a Jewish Dutch Benedict Spinoza. The same Benedict Spinoza who is a famous philosopher of the world, but he used to earn his livelihood by grinding lenses.
Thanks to the quality he brought to the construction of the telescope, Hughes discovered the aurora of Saturn, which only Galileo could see before that. But Huygens recognized the nature of this ‘circle’ that it is a ‘heavy flattened circumference’. If we look at this circumference with today’s more powerful telescope, we will find that this circumference is actually a set of three circumferences – three huge piles of ‘dust’ which are circling around Saturn with great intensity. Huygens invented many instruments related to eyes, in which Huygens’s eye-piece is still used in our microscopes.
At the age of 24, Huygens was elected a member of the Royal Society of London. When he reached England to receive this honour, he met Newton. Newton was no less impressed by his versatility. He also tried to get Huygens’ work done in London itself. But he did not get success in this. The thing was that this scientist from Holland was still known to very few people outside his home country, and that too to “a few scientific friends”. As a result, even Newton could not put any wealthy parents in touch with him to keep a foreign scientist free from his economic concerns. Could
Several years later, Louis XIV, who had vowed that at any cost the head of France should be held high in the study of science, offered Huygens the presidency of a scientific research institute, which he held from 1666 to 1666. Remained till 1681 AD.
While living in France, he wrote his great book ‘An Essay on Light’. But it was published many years later in 1690 AD. Huygens himself has admitted that, being a human being after all, how it took so long for it to appear in print. The original book was written in French and he thought of translating it into Latin as well. But that first attachment, to the idea and to its presentation, once slackened, more and more works incessantly attracted him, and the plan of translation fell further and further behind. He had to give up the idea of translation and had to quickly get it printed in French and put it aside, so that by delaying it, he might lose the credit for the originality of those ideas and someone else would win.
Christian Hughes had a reputation in his day as the inventor of the pendulum clock. He was not only its inventor, but he could also explain what is the law behind the movement of the pendulum and how it works. The idea that the pendulum can be used to count clock-seconds was first thought by Galileo as well, but no one could give a practical form of its utility in making clocks before Huygens.
Many scientists wrestled their brains with the problem, but they remained unsuccessful. Huygens made the first pendulum clock in 1657 AD. The successful mechanism of the clock was based on the rules involved in the operation of a compound pendulum. These were ‘directed’ by Huygens. How much the hands of the clock should ‘move’ with one movement of the sphere. He had directly proved something like a kind of ‘escapement’ and along with it, he had also guessed the principle of open suspension of the pendulum. Huygens’ clock started telling the exact hours and minutes. Moon, Along with the stars, a man-made device also started counting time! Now this pendulum clock was sent to aid in sea voyages and, that’s when, its problems started. The attention of the inventor had not yet gone towards ‘Earth’s gravity’.
Each movement of the pendulum takes the same amount of time – yes, if Earth’s gravity remains the same. In fact, the pendulum falls from its height to the lowest point only because the gravity of the earth is pulling it downwards every moment. Take the clock to the top of a mountain – away from the center of the earth – and then see, the fall of the pendulum is no longer the same speed, it will now take longer to swing from side to side – with the result that the clock will slowly – Slowly minutes and seconds will start losing. It was only possible on the top of the mountain, it was more ‘regular’. But this watch was taken to Sayen Island in French Guiana. Sayen is at sea level, not on a hilltop. There also she started slowing down. Why did this happen? What was the matter?
Hughes analyzed the question. He knew that by tying a stone to a rope, if it is whirled around, then this stone binds itself to the circumference of the sutra-circle, as if neutralizing gravity. And the truth is that if the force in this ‘pollination’ of the formula is too much, then this rope can also break. Huygens named this power and force as ‘centrifugal’ center-regressive power. The earth also rotates like a top and revolves very fast. It takes 24 hours to complete one revolution around its axis. It is orbiting the Earth at the equator at an incredible speed of more than 1,000 miles per hour. Any object existing on the equator, like a stone tied at the end of a thread, is anxious to break its bond with the earth. Now, if we leave the equator and move towards the north and south poles, the earth will still complete one rotation in 24 hours, but at these two points its speed will no longer be the same as it was at the equator. Take a look at your bicycle by turning it to one side – the spokes at the end will be faintly visible, while near the center they can be seen clearly – because there they do not have the same speed. And in the center point of the parikrama, it is as if there is no movement at all!
At every point on the earth, at every place, there is a force of gravity – the effort to pull the object towards the center of the earth. Northern This is the work of gravity on the pole; But at any other place, his work ‘along with’ is also to take care that the things do not break their connection with the earth by coming in the heat of their own center-regressive instinct. And this centripetal retrograde of objects is at its zenith on the equator because on this line the motion of the earth is also at its personal zenith.
When the pendulum clock invented by Christian Hughes was taken to French Guiana, there was some reduction in its time. When Huygens found out how much time she had lost in this way, while doing the calculations, she came to the conclusion that “at the equator, there is some bulge in the Earth.”
That is, the gravity in the Earth at the equator can no longer remain the same, it will be relatively less; As a result of which there will naturally be some slowness in the hands of the clocks, because the same speed can no longer remain in the rise and fall of the pendulum. Huygens calculated how much slack the clock speed should have at the equator. The basis of his calculations was a comparison of the motions of the earth at the equator and at Paris. But the hands of the clock turned out to be much slower than he expected. Now there was only one possibility left that there should be a bulge in the earth at the equator, due to which its gravity becomes even more difficult. It was the combined effect of centripetal retrograde and the bulge of the equator that the same clocks were now two and a half minutes behind in a day.
If these pendulum clocks prove ineffective in sea travel, then there should be some remedy for that too. Now this was a new question before Huygens. He also found a solution for it – ‘Spiral Watch Spring’. Huygens patented this spring because he knew that Robert Hooke had already invented it. And the fact is that Hooke brought his theory to the fore only when Huygens’s invention was respected everywhere. With regard to clocks, Huygens was not the only invention, he had an epoch-making reputation; He researched ‘cycloidal’, even today we use it in pendulum clocks.
Hughes has a reputation for another reason as well. Regarding what is the basic nature of the rays of light, he presented an establishment that like sound and water, light is also wave-like in nature. He assumed that light also propagated in waves, but at the same time, he was sure that where the speed of sound is blocked in ‘void’, light cannot .
Huygens also offered a model of how these waves travel: “Take some spheres of the same size of hard metal and arrange them in a straight line – such that they are in contact with each other. . Now, if the nearby shell is hit with another similar shell, then this movement will automatically reach the first shell lying far away, our eyes will not even be able to guess how all this happened.
He tested this ideal in two ways. Some spheres were allowed to remain in the same line and some were kept ‘supported’ in the same way at an angle of 90° to it. But the speed of vibrations was the same in both the directions – east-west as well as south-north. That is, two rays of light do not meet each other even after ‘violating’ each other!
In this way, Hughes established the ‘wave theory’ in relation to light and on the basis of that explained reflection, refraction, and polarization in the field of light. . But Newton had already presented his ‘corpuscular theory’ about light itself, and Newton was the scientist-head of that era. The establishment of this ‘particle theory’ of light is that light, from the source of light, is continuously bursting into small sparks. World scientists went on blindly following this principle for two hundred years. After all, Maxwell came and proved that wave-theory is more suitable in the field of light, as well as simpler. Subsequently, Einstein and Planck invented Newton’s ‘corpuscular theory’ in a new form in the study of photoelectricity. The modern tendency is to integrate the two, concrete and abstract, views of ‘particle’ and ‘wave’.