Review of Dutch Light by Hugh Aldersey Williams, pub. Picador 2020

This is subtitled “Christiaan Huygens and the Making of Science in Europe”; it would not be wholly accurate to call it a biography of Huygens since his father Constantiyn takes up nearly as much of the book. The two were similar in talent but differed in their ways of exercising it. Constantiyn was an amateur in the best sense, a man of wide interests both scientific and artistic, a musician and poet who also had a bent for architecture and design. Christiaan, though he too had musical and artistic interests, was far more of a specialist, a genuine “scientist”, though the term was not then common, who was particularly fascinated by astronomy, optics and everything to do with the nature and movement of light.

Unsurprisingly, Constantiyn is the more engaging and interesting personality – people of wide interests are usually more entertaining than specialists – but Christiaan’s work and way of thinking are themselves fascinating. Williams is concerned to rectify the lack of notice from which his subject suffers in comparison with his contemporary Isaac Newton. In their day, they were seen as equals, which seems reasonable when you consider that Christiaan was the first to identify the rings of Saturn, figured out that light moves in waves (unlike Newton) and, in rejecting the idea that motion was absolute rather than relative to its surroundings, came very close, as Einstein recognised, to a theory of relativity in general.

The title alludes to the interesting likeness between Dutch art and science in prioritising the nature of light. Williams speculates not altogether seriously on whether there really was a particular form of ambient light in the Netherlands and concludes not, but I do wonder whether the “big sky” one finds in a flat country helped it produce more than its fair share of astronomers. What certainly must have helped were the Dutch advances in lens-grinding, a job which scholars experimenting with new and better devices for seeing the world did not disdain to do for themselves – Huygens and his brother ground their own lenses, when they did not use those being turned out by the equally skilled practitioner Spinoza, who made a living from lens-grinding when not philosophizing.

Several other big names turn up in bit parts in this story – Cassini, forever finding new moons, Rembrandt, a protégé of Christiaan’s father Constantiyn, the unfortunate de Witt brothers for whom politics went so horribly and terminally wrong. One of the most interesting to me was Henry Oldenburg, born Heinrich, one of the founder members of the Royal Society and an internationalist who spent a lot of his time keeping scientists in various countries in contact with each other, helping them acquire what they needed for research, nudging them to get their work published and patching up the quarrels that inevitably arose between ambitious men touchy about who discovered what and when. I knew him from another recent book which focuses on his role in keeping the Society firmly sceptical about pseudo-sciences like astrology, but his role as facilitator-general is even more admirable.

The book, like the lives of Christiaan and his family, moves between Holland, Paris and London, and its picture of Dutch life at the time - questioning, tolerant, civilised (who knew there was a canal-based public transport system between the main towns?) - is as interesting as any of its portraits of individuals. It is generously illustrated, with copious notes and index. In the description of Christiaan’s death, what is said about his unorthodox religious views made me want to learn more of them, but since they seem to have come as something of a shock to his own family, perhaps not much more is known (he seems to have felt that immortality consisted only of what we leave behind us).

I was glad to have learned more, not only about Huygens father and son, but about the place and the fascinating period of history in which they lived.