Science is My Religion

Science Is My Religion

In Italy, Galileo had announced other worlds, and Giordano Bruno had speculated on other life-forms. For this, they had been made to suffer brutally. But in Holland, the astronomer Christian Huygens, who believed in both, was showered in honors. His father was Constantijn Huygens, a master diplomat of the age, a litterateur, poet, composer, musician, close friend and translator of the English poet John Donne, and the head of an archetypical great family. Constantijn admired the painter Rubens, and “discovered” a young artist named Rembrandt van Rijn, in several of whose works he subsequently appears. After their first meeting Descartes wrote of him: “I couldn’t never believe that a single mind could occupy itself with so many things and equip itself so well in all of them”.

The Huygens home was filled with goods from all over the world. Distinguished thinkers from other nations were frequent guests. Growing up in this environment, the young Christian Huygens became simultaneously adept in languages, drawing, law, science, engineering, mathematics and music. His interests and allegiances were broad. “The world is my country”, he said, “science is my religion”.

Light was a motif of the age: the symbolic enlightenment of freedom of thought and religion, of geographical discovery; the light that permeated the painting of the time, particularly the exquisite work of Vermeer; and light as an object of scientific inquiry, as in Shell’s study of refraction, Leeuwenhoek’s invention of the microscope and Huygens’ own wave theory of light. These were all connected activities, and their practitioners mingled freely. Vermeer’s interior are characteristically filled with nautical artifacts and wall maps. Microscopes were drawing-room curiosities. Leeuwenhoek was the executor of Vermeer’s estate and a frequent visitor at the Huygens home at Hofwijck.

Stars are campfires. The world is my country, science is my religion (Christian Huygens). Image: Light Colors by ©Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Isaac Newton admired Christian Huygens and thought him “the most elegant mathematician of their time”, and the truest follower of the mathematical tradition of the ancient Greeks – then, as now, a great compliment. Newton believed, in part because shadows had sharp edges, that light behaved as if it were a stream of tiny particles. He thought that red light was composed of the largest particles and violet the smallest. Huygens argued that instead light behaved as if it were a wave propagating in a vacuum, as an ocean wave does in the sea – which is why we talk about the wavelength and frequency of light.

Many properties of light, including diffraction, are naturally explained by the wave theory, and in subsequent years Huygens’ view carried the day. But in 1905, Einstein showed that the particle theory of light could explain the photoelectric effect, the ejection of electrons from a metal upon exposure to a beam of light. Modern quantum mechanics combines both ideas, and it is customary today to think of light as behaving in some circumstances as a beam of particles and in others as a wave. This wave particle dualism may not correspond readily to our common-sense notions, but it is in excellent accord with what experiments have shown light really does. There is something mysterious and stirring in the marriage of opposites, and it is fitting that Newton and Huygens, bachelors both, were the parents of our modern understanding of the nature of light.