What do you think?
Rate this book
The Celestial Worlds Discovered: Or Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets
First published in 1968
162 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1698
1 person is currently reading
257 people want to read
About the author
Christiaan Huygens
207 books57 followersChristiaan Huygens, FRS (/ˈhaɪɡənz/ or /ˈhɔɪɡənz/; Dutch: [ˈɦœy̆ɣə(n)s] (Latin: Hugenius) (14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695) was a prominent Dutch mathematician and scientist. He is known particularly as an astronomer, physicist, probabilist and horologist.
Huygens was a leading scientist of his time. His work included early telescopic studies of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan, the invention of the pendulum clock and other investigations in timekeeping. He published major studies of mechanics and optics, and a pioneer work on games of chance.
Christiaan Huygens was born on 14 April 1629 in The Hague, into a rich and influential Dutch family, the second son of Constantijn Huygens. Christiaan was named after his paternal grandfather. His mother was Suzanna van Baerle. She died in 1637, shortly after the birth of Huygens' sister. The couple had five children: Constantijn (1628), Christiaan (1629), Lodewijk (1631), Philips (1632) and Suzanna (1637).
Constantijn Huygens was a diplomat and advisor to the House of Orange, and also a poet and musician. His friends included Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne and René Descartes. Huygens was educated at home until turning sixteen years old. He liked to play with miniatures of mills and other machines. His father gave him a liberal education: he studied languages and music, history and geography, mathematics, logic and rhetoric, but also dancing, fencing and horse riding.
In 1644 Huygens had as his mathematical tutor Jan Jansz de Jonge Stampioen, who set the 15-year-old a demanding reading list on contemporary science. Descartes was impressed by his skills in geometry.
Shortly before his death in 1695, Huygens completed Cosmotheoros, published posthumously in 1698. In it he speculated on the existence of extraterrestrial life, on other planets, which he imagined was similar to that on Earth.
Such speculations were not uncommon at the time, justified by Copernicanism or the plenitude principle. But Huygens went into greater detail. The work, translated into English in its year of publication, has been seen as in the fanciful tradition of Francis Godwin, John Wilkins and Cyrano de Bergerac, and fundamentally Utopian; and also to owe in its concept of planet to cosmography in the sense of Peter Heylin.
Huygens wrote that availability of water in liquid form was essential for life and that the properties of water must vary from planet to planet to suit the temperature range. He took his observations of dark and bright spots on the surfaces of Mars and Jupiter to be evidence of water and ice on those planets. He argued that extraterrestrial life is neither confirmed nor denied by the Bible, and questioned why God would create the other planets if they were not to serve a greater purpose than that of being admired from Earth. Huygens postulated that the great distance between the planets signified that God had not intended for beings on one to know about the beings on the others, and had not foreseen how much humans would advance in scientific knowledge.
It was also in this book that Huygens published his method for estimating stellar distances. He made a series of smaller holes in a screen facing the sun, until he estimated the light was of the same intensity as that of the star Sirius. He then calculated that the angle of this hole was 1/27,664th the diameter of the Sun, and thus it was about 30,000 times as far away, on the (incorrect) assumption that Sirius is as bright our sun. The subject of photometry remained in its infancy until Pierre Bouguer and Johann Heinrich Lambert.
Huygens was a leading scientist of his time. His work included early telescopic studies of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan, the invention of the pendulum clock and other investigations in timekeeping. He published major studies of mechanics and optics, and a pioneer work on games of chance.
Christiaan Huygens was born on 14 April 1629 in The Hague, into a rich and influential Dutch family, the second son of Constantijn Huygens. Christiaan was named after his paternal grandfather. His mother was Suzanna van Baerle. She died in 1637, shortly after the birth of Huygens' sister. The couple had five children: Constantijn (1628), Christiaan (1629), Lodewijk (1631), Philips (1632) and Suzanna (1637).
Constantijn Huygens was a diplomat and advisor to the House of Orange, and also a poet and musician. His friends included Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne and René Descartes. Huygens was educated at home until turning sixteen years old. He liked to play with miniatures of mills and other machines. His father gave him a liberal education: he studied languages and music, history and geography, mathematics, logic and rhetoric, but also dancing, fencing and horse riding.
In 1644 Huygens had as his mathematical tutor Jan Jansz de Jonge Stampioen, who set the 15-year-old a demanding reading list on contemporary science. Descartes was impressed by his skills in geometry.
Shortly before his death in 1695, Huygens completed Cosmotheoros, published posthumously in 1698. In it he speculated on the existence of extraterrestrial life, on other planets, which he imagined was similar to that on Earth.
Such speculations were not uncommon at the time, justified by Copernicanism or the plenitude principle. But Huygens went into greater detail. The work, translated into English in its year of publication, has been seen as in the fanciful tradition of Francis Godwin, John Wilkins and Cyrano de Bergerac, and fundamentally Utopian; and also to owe in its concept of planet to cosmography in the sense of Peter Heylin.
Huygens wrote that availability of water in liquid form was essential for life and that the properties of water must vary from planet to planet to suit the temperature range. He took his observations of dark and bright spots on the surfaces of Mars and Jupiter to be evidence of water and ice on those planets. He argued that extraterrestrial life is neither confirmed nor denied by the Bible, and questioned why God would create the other planets if they were not to serve a greater purpose than that of being admired from Earth. Huygens postulated that the great distance between the planets signified that God had not intended for beings on one to know about the beings on the others, and had not foreseen how much humans would advance in scientific knowledge.
It was also in this book that Huygens published his method for estimating stellar distances. He made a series of smaller holes in a screen facing the sun, until he estimated the light was of the same intensity as that of the star Sirius. He then calculated that the angle of this hole was 1/27,664th the diameter of the Sun, and thus it was about 30,000 times as far away, on the (incorrect) assumption that Sirius is as bright our sun. The subject of photometry remained in its infancy until Pierre Bouguer and Johann Heinrich Lambert.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 3, 2015
I found this book on Google Books and read it out of historical interest. Huygens spends much of the book speculating about what life might be like on other planets. This is the least interesting part of the book, I think, to the modern reader, because it consists largely of speculating that life will be very much like the life on Earth on theological (perhaps teleological would be a better word?) grounds. It becomes much more interesting when he starts speculating about what those extraterrestrial astronomers would see: The brightness of the sun, the positiions and appearances of the other planets and moons, etc. He also brings his astronomical knowledge to bear on the scale of the universe: The sizes and relative positions of the Sun, planets and moons, and estimating a lower limit of the distances to the stars. I was particularly interested in his effort to relate the scales of the universe to more concrete experience. Huygens talks about the scale of the universe in terms of a scale model built with an Earth the size of a millet seed and a sun four inches across, and several times talks about distances in terms of how long it would take a bullet to traverse the same interval of space.
It drags a bit, and the translation is clearly quite old, but if you want a window into 17th Century astronomy and don't mind having to work distinguish tall s's from f's, it's worth a read.
It drags a bit, and the translation is clearly quite old, but if you want a window into 17th Century astronomy and don't mind having to work distinguish tall s's from f's, it's worth a read.
March 15, 2025
Fascinating to read the thoughts of a 17th century scientist about our solar system and beyond. At times genuinely funny because of the roasting of other scientists at the time, dissing their conjectures as "obviously" flawed.
November 27, 2020
It's a fascinating book written by a fascinating man who scored so many victories for humanity. You can't read it without being emotional and without feeling the joy of entering the mind of a brilliant man who lived many centuries ago and left so many gifts for us. Absolutely loved it!
August 31, 2024
In de vertaling van P. Rabus online te vinden.
Dit werk weerspiegeld het wetenschappelijk beeld van het universum aan het eind van de 17e eeuw. Huygens beschouwd de aannames en stellingen van figuren als Copernicus, Galilei, Decartes, Newton, Brahe et cetera kritisch en probeert een beeld van het zonnestelsel en de rest van het universum te vormen.
Een centrale aanname van Huygens is dat God al die planeten niet geschapen zou hebben zonder ze te bevolken met (intelligent) leven, en zodoende probeert Huygens een educated guess te maken over het het eraan toe gaat op die verre planeten.
Het leest niet heel vlot, en het idee dit als een vroeg science fiction boek te zien is nogal vergezocht.
Dit werk weerspiegeld het wetenschappelijk beeld van het universum aan het eind van de 17e eeuw. Huygens beschouwd de aannames en stellingen van figuren als Copernicus, Galilei, Decartes, Newton, Brahe et cetera kritisch en probeert een beeld van het zonnestelsel en de rest van het universum te vormen.
Een centrale aanname van Huygens is dat God al die planeten niet geschapen zou hebben zonder ze te bevolken met (intelligent) leven, en zodoende probeert Huygens een educated guess te maken over het het eraan toe gaat op die verre planeten.
Het leest niet heel vlot, en het idee dit als een vroeg science fiction boek te zien is nogal vergezocht.
July 12, 2022
When you imbue all Earth's creatures with divine purpose and design, then all planets must have the same kinds of creatures: seed plants, herbivores, reverent "higher" animals, etc. Huygen's constraining teleology seems at odds with the creativity required to imagine alien worlds.
April 6, 2024
The old English can be challenging to decipher but the vast scope of Huygen's ideas and imagination radiate down the centuries. There's no substitute for reading his own worlds.
November 25, 2024
Versie van Daphne Stam gelezen. Interessant boek waar Huygens iedereen door het slijk haalt.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews