Christiaan Huygens

But the precision required for tracking minutes was still several centuries away and would not be attained by improving the old verge-and-foliot methods used thus far.

Rather, the big breakthrough eventually came halfway through the 17th century when Dutch mathematician and astronomer Christian Huygens reapplied the theoretical work on pendulums conducted by Galileo to invent the pendulum clock, the first timepiece accurate enough to track minutes as well as hours.

Patented in 1657, Huygens' device used a long pendulum rod that swung back and forth which, much like old clock towers, continuously latched onto and then released a weighted escape wheel.

Only a complete back-and-forth swing is capable of turning the dial, and this, my friends, is where we get that iconic, oh-so-familiar tick-tock sound you heard at the start.

[clock ticking] Huygens' pendulum clock minified the margins of error plaguing contemporary timepieces from about 15 minutes a day to just one minute per day, with later refinements minimizing this discrepancy further to just seconds.

Thus, the pendulum clock became the standard for another 250 years to come, revolutionizing humanity's relationship with time in the fields of science, astronomy and, before long, transportation.

But when it came to the latter, these devices were far from ideal, not least because they were so large and importable while also being vulnerable to temperature changes that muddled their ticks.

She yields her treasures to such only as fear not.

I had read in a book of Huygens, Guinand, Newton, Herschel, the great high priests of science who had striven through patient years to read the hieroglyphics of the heavens.

The wise imbeciles, I thought, they toiled and died, and nature held no mirror up to them.

For me, the poor Camellia, she worked in secret while they grew old and passed unsatisfied.

And we call our pilot facility Cassini.

In, uh, the 2000s, uh, NASA and the, uh, couple international space agencies launched a probe, uh, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft.

It surveyed Saturn's moon, Titan, and what it found is on Titan, it naturally rains acrylonitrile, which is the monomer that we target.

So Huygens was the probe that was sent to actually collect that data and identified it.

Alchemy, magic, astrology imposed on everyone's belief.

Modern science began only after sixteen hundred, with Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Torricelli, Pascal, Harvey, Newton, Huygens, and Boyle.

Five men, telling one another in succession the discoveries which their lives had witnessed, could deliver the whole of it into our hands.

Harvey might have told Newton, who might have told Voltaire; Voltaire might have told Dalton, who might have told Huxley, who might have told the readers of this book.

If light is waves and you're trying to get an image through light, then you can think of the light colloquially as like little fingers trying to feel the sample, right? And if the fingers are too fat, you're not gonna feel the structure below the level of those fingers, right? And so basically, about half the wavelength of light is what Ernst Abbe mathematically determined is the limit.

You know, he did it, but, you know, as soon as people understood the wave nature of light, going back to Huygens or, or certainly Maxwell, all of this could have been easily deduced.

Um, but he was the guy who really realized from a, from a real imaging perspective that that was a fundamental limit.

You know, in, in, in many fields, of course, you know, when I first started getting in in the '80s in graduate school, there was obviously already semiconductors and other structures that were pushing those same limits in terms of their manufacture and so forth.

but to suppose that god created that tendency with the intention of deceiving him would argue a want of veracity in the divine nature incompatible with its perfection such reasoning obviously ignores the alternative that god might be deceiving us for our good or rather what we call truth might not be an insight into the nature of things in themselves but a correct judgment of antecedents and consequence Our consciousness would then be a vast sensory motor machinery adjusted to secure the maintenance and perfection of life.

descartes as a mathematician places the essence of matter or body in extension here he agrees with another mathematical philosopher plato who says the same in his timaeus so far the coincidence might be accidental but when we find that the frenchman like the greek conceives his materialised space as being originally divided into triangular bodies the evidence of unacknowledged borrowing seems irresistible the more so that Huygens mentions this as customary with Descartes.

The great author of The Method and the Meditations, for after every critical deduction his greatness as a thinker remains undoubted, contributed nothing to ethics.

Here he is content to reaffirm the general conclusions of Greek philosophy, the necessary superiority of mind to matter, of the soul to the body, of spirit to sense.

Descartes produced formulae.

Huygens produced formulae.

Newton produced formulae.

As a particular example of the effect of the abstract development of mathematics upon the science of those times, consider the notion of periodicity.

Galileo observed the periodic vibrations of pendulums.

Newton explained sound as being due to the disturbance of air by the passage through it of periodic waves of condensation and rarefaction.

Huygens explained light as being due to transverse waves of vibration of a subtle ether.

Mersenne connected the period of the vibration of a violin string with its density, tension, and length.

And if two watch movements start to synchronize and to influence each other, and synchronize their frequency, the time becomes much more consistent and the time is much more reliable to external shocks and impacts because they do help each other keeping a very consistent frequency.

A phenomenon which got discovered by Christian Huygens, the inventor of the pendulum, more than 400 years ago, And then there was a handful of them, like the most famous watchmaker who dedicated themselves to solve the resonance problem.

We had Abraham-Louis Breguet, we had Antti Janvier, recently we had François Paul Journe.

So, because it's not only a huge challenge of having two independent movements in one watch, But to bring them to beat in synchronization is what it's all about, resonance.