Congresses and Symposia (Book Review).

Of all the giants of seventeenth-century science (if at least we opt to exclude Thomas Harriot) the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens remains possibly the most remote to us three centuries on, even though there exists a comprehensive modern edition of his letters and works, manuscript and printed, in twenty-two thick volumes. In the thirty years since this was completed it has almost been as if the very omni-inclusiveness of that grand example of careful scholarship in the history of exact sciences--no matter that its deficiencies and lacunas become increasingly obvious as both historical learning and historiography progress--has acted as a bar to further study of Huygen's achievement when and where it should have stimulated it. Our own purblindness must be held largely responsible for that. But it is true that (unlike Descartes, Newton or Leibniz for instance) Huygens left behind him no earnest lieutenants, no school or adherents zealous to propagandize his name and surpass his deeds. In our textbooks of history of science he receives but scant notice for having had a viable theory of elastic collision and a notion of centrifugal force, for first formulating a wave theory of light, and (it may be) for discovering Saturn's ring-formation and its largest satellite Titan. And there might also be some statement to the effect that the was a good mathematician of sorts. The present book is composed of the invited papers given at a symposium held at Amsterdam in August 1979 in commemoration of the 350th anniversary of Huygens' birth, to tell the world more--and better truth--about his life and achievement, and securely to place him in his scientific milieu. But the question was also several times raised why he made so little impact upon it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]