Furthermore, Huygens concluded that Descartes's laws for the elastic collision of two bodies must be wrong, and he formulated the correct laws.

Christiaan Huygens published a book on the subject in 1657 and in the 19th century a big work was done by Laplace in what can be considered today as the classic interpretation.

In his 1678 Traité de la Lumiere, Christiaan Huygens showed how Snell's law of sines could be explained by, or derived from, the wave nature of light, using what we have come to call the Huygens – Fresnel principle.

As a distinct field, experimental physics was established in early modern Europe, during what is known as the Scientific Revolution, by physicists such as Galileo Galilei, Christiaan Huygens, Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal and Sir Isaac Newton.

He uses the Principle of Huygens to investigate, in classical terms, what transpires.

Diffraction arises because of the way in which waves propagate ; this is described by the Huygens – Fresnel principle and the principle of superposition of waves.

Huygens ' principle when applied to an aperture simply says that the far-field diffraction pattern is the spatial Fourier transform of the aperture shape, and this is a direct by-product of using the parallel-rays approximation, which is identical to doing a plane wave decomposition of the aperture plane fields ( see Fourier optics ).

The Huygens – Fresnel principle is one such model ; it states that each point on a wavefront generates a secondary spherical wavelet, and that the disturbance at any subsequent point can be found by summing the contributions of the individual wavelets at that point.

The Huygens – Fresnel principle ( named after Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens and French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel ) is a method of analysis applied to problems of wave propagation both in the far-field limit and in near-field diffraction.

However, this article provides an interesting discussion of the limitations of the principle and also of different scientists ' views as to whether it is an accurate representation of reality or whether " Huygens ' principle actually does give the right answer but for the wrong reasons ".

Using Huygens ' theory and the principle of superposition of waves, the complex amplitude at a further point P is found by summing the contributions from each point on the sphere of radius r < sub > 0 </ sub >.

The only aether which has survived is that which was invented by Huygens to explain the propagation of light.

* 1655 – Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is discovered by Christiaan Huygens.

There has been some debate about who the original inventor of the magic lantern is, but the most widely accepted theory is that Christiaan Huygens developed the original device in the late 1650s.

( More specifically, the site of the resonance is the Huygens Gap, which bounds the outer edge of the B Ring.

The Huygens – Fresnel equation is one such model.

This phenomenon is called Huygens ' principle.

* March 25 – Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is discovered by Christian Huygens.

* December – The pendulum clock is invented by Christiaan Huygens.

In 1659 Huygens derived the now well-known formula for the centripetal force, exerted by an object describing a circular motion, for instance on the string to which it is attached, in modern notation:

Huygens is remembered especially for his wave theory of light, which he first communicated in 1678 to France's Royal Académie des sciences and which he published in 1690 in his Treatise on light ( see also Huygens-Fresnel principle ).

Huygens is not known ever to have made a clock himself, however ; he contracted the construction of his designs to Salomon Coster in The Hague.

The oldest known Huygens style pendulum clock is dated 1657 and can be seen at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden which also shows an important astronomical clock owned and used by Huygens.

This is because Huygens watches employed a spiral balance spring.

A second-generation Mariner spacecraft, called the Mariner Mark II series, eventually evolved into the Cassini – Huygens probe, now in orbit around Saturn.

Indeed Fermat's principle does not hold standing alone, we now know it can be derived from earlier principles such as Huygens ' principle.

Huygens achieved note for his argument that light consists of waves, now known as the Huygens – Fresnel principle, which two centuries later became instrumental in the understanding of wave-particle duality.

In 1661, a grandfather by now, Huygens was sent to France by the circle of tutors of William III, to recover possession of the county of Orange.

As he was older now, Huygens found refuge in music.

Huygens was built under the Prime Contractorship of Aérospatiale in its Cannes Mandelieu Space Center, France, now part of Thales Alenia Space.

The theory now called “ Le Sage ’ s theory of gravity ” was originally proposed in the 1690s by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, a friend of Isaac Newton and Christian Huygens.

Space probes have been placed into orbit around all the five planets known to the ancients: first Mars ( Mariner 9, 1971 ), then Venus ( Venera 9, 1975 ; but landings on Venus and atmospheric probes were performed even earlier ), Jupiter ( Galileo, 1995 ), Saturn ( Cassini / Huygens, 2004 ), and most recently Mercury ( MESSENGER, March 2011 ), and have returned data about these bodies and their natural satellites.

Christiaan Huygens ( 1657 ) gave the earliest known scientific treatment of the subject.

* The result above is a corollary of a general theorem by Christiaan Huygens which is also known as gambler's ruin.

During the period 1692-1693 Newton is known to have suffered a breakdown of nervous functioning, or a supposed psychosis ( Spivak & Epstein ) lasting for 18 months, as reported by Huygens.

A versatile poet loosely associated with the Circle of Muiden was the diplomat Constantijn Huygens ( 1596 – 1687 ), perhaps best known for his witty epigrams.

The socialists asked for specific conditions in exchange for their participation in the government ( known as " conditions Huygens ").

In honour of his contribution to European space, it was decided by ESA, NASA, and the international Committee for Space Research ( COSPAR ) to name the landing site of the Huygens probe after him, and from 14 March 2007 it is known as the " Hubert Curien Memorial Station ".

Huygens software is named after the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens who is perhaps best known for his argument that light behaves like waves.

In 1668, Wilkins proposed using Christopher Wren's suggestion of a pendulum with a half-period of one second to measure a standard length that Christiaan Huygens had observed to be 38 Rhineland or English inches ( 997mm ) in length.

In the Axioms Scholium of his Principia Newton said its axiomatic three laws of motion were already accepted by mathematicians such as Huygens ( 1629 – 1695 ), Wallace, Wren and others, and also in memos in his draft preparations of the second edition of the Principia he attributed its first law of motion and its law of gravity to a range of historical figures.

But Bullialdus did not accept Kepler ’ s second and third laws, nor did he appreciate Christiaan Huygens ’ s solution for circular motion ( motion in a straight line pulled aside by the central force ).

Christiaan Huygens was born in April 1629 at The Hague, the second son of Constantijn Huygens, ( 1596 – 1687 ), friend of mathematician, philosopher and minor physicist René Descartes, and of Suzanna van Baerle ( deceased 1637 ), whom Constantijn had married on 6 April 1627.

The second pendulum clock, built by Christiaan Huygens in 1673.

Constantijn Huygens was born in The Hague, the second son of Christiaan Huygens ( senior ), secretary of the Council of State, and Susanna Hoefnagel, niece of the Antwerp painter Joris Hoefnagel.

* Christiaan Huygens designs the first working pendulum clock, which is sufficiently accurate to be fitted with both a minute hand and a second hand.

The second verge pendulum clock built by Christian Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock, 1673.