Books about Huygens from Amazon.com

Gnomes is the product of Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen’s observation of the local gnome population in Holland Until Gnomes was first published in Dutch in 1976, these friendly nocturnal creatures were only represented in folk lore; descriptions were often incomplete or simply inaccurate. Poortvliet and Huygen, having studied and interviewed gnomes for two decades, set out to fill this gap with their own encyclopedic tome.

Gnomes covers all areas of gnome culture, including architecture, education, courtship, medicine, industry, and relationships with other mythical creatures. Huygen’s sober descriptions are balanced by Poortvliet’s light-hearted portrayals of gnomes at work and at play. Thirty years later, this beautifully illustrated volume continues to engage and enchant readers of all ages. .
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An account of the life and work of gnomes, based on first-hand observations by the author and artist, who, themselves turned into gnomes, visited with gnomes in Lapland and Siberia .
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Cassini At Saturn – Huygens Results brings the story of the Cassini-Huygens mission and their joint exploration of the Saturnian system right up to date. Cassini entered orbit around Saturn June 2004 so this update includes 8 months of scientific data available for review, including the most spectacular images of Saturn, its rings and satellites ever obtained by a space mission. As the Cassini spacecraft approached its destination in spring 2004, the quality of the images already being returned by the spacecraft clearly demonstrated the spectacular nature of the close-range views that will be obtained. The book contains a 16-page colour section, comprising a carefully chosen selection of the most stunning images to be released during the spacecraft’s initial period of operation.

The Huygens craft, released by Cassini, parachuted through the clouds of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in January 2005. David Harland tells the exciting story of the this craft’s journey to the surface of one of the most enigmatic bodies on the Solar System, the only moon to have a dense atmosphere and possibly lakes of liquid gas at -190ºC on its surface. Titan is considered to be an early Earth in deep freeze, possibly with the building blocks of life in its atmosphere. There will undoubtedly be enormous interest in the first results and images of Titan’s surface, and this book is the first incisive summary of this groundbreaking material.

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This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1885 edition by the Hakluyt Society, London..
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Pop-up pictures with movable parts and text describe the daily life of a gnome as he works, plays, and interacts with animals .
Price: $91.16 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Text extracted from opening pages of book: CHRISTIAN HUYGENS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY By A. E. BELL. Ph. D., M. Sc. Head of the Science Department, Sandhurst Formerly Head of the Science Department, Clifton College, LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD & CO. COPYRIGHT First published 1947 Reprinted 1950 Printed in Great Britain by Sons Ltd., Guild ford and Es/ ier Christian Huygens PREFACE THERE can be no doubt that Christian Huygens was one of the greatest scientific geniuses of all time. A man who transformed the telescope from being a toy into a powerful instrument of in vestigation, and this as a consequence of profound optical researches; who discovered Saturn's ring and the satellite Titan; who drew attention to the Nebula in Orion; who studied the prob lem of gravity in a quantitative manner, arriving at correct ideas about the effects of centrifugal force and the shape of the earth; who, in the great work Horologium Oscillatorium, founded the dynamics of systems and cleared up the whole subject of the compound pendulum and the tautochrone; who solved the out standing problems concerned with collision of elastic bodies and out of much intractable work developed the general notion of energy and work; who is rightly regarded as the founder of the wave theory in light, and thus of physical optics such a man deserves memory with the names of Galileo and Newton, and only the accidents of history have so far prevented this. It might be argued that Robert Hooke, who like Huygens was influenced by Descartes 's teachings, is of equal stature and showed as much inventive genius and intuition. In the extraordinary range of their activities there is some similarity. The overwhelming difference lies in the fact that Huygens was a great mathema tician and exponent of the quantitative method, whereas Hooke could never get beyond the first phase of a piece of work : that which led to the need of exact measurement and the discovery of mathematical relations. Having made this claim for Huygens, it is natural to ask how he compares with Newton. It is a question which arises from time to time in these pages, and one to which there is no epigrammatic answer. In some senses it was Huygens's greatest misfortune to grow up under the powerful influence of Descartes, who was a grfeat friend of his father, a frequent visitor to the 5 6 THE LIFE OF CHRISTIAN HUYCENS family, and master of at least one disciple who taught Huygens at the university. From Descartes too many of Huygens's hypotheses were taken, so much so that he might stand as the exact opposite of Newton, whose objection hypotheses non fingo he did so much to call forth. Looking at Huygens in this way it is easy to dismiss him as a Cartesian , one whose ideas were largely superseded after the publication of Newton's Principia. But this would be a serious mistake. If he could not so brilliantly see the way to extend the sphere of natural law to the heavens, perceiving that the task of science is not to disclose a mechanism so much as to arrive at laws, he neverthe less did important work to prepare men of science for this modern attitude. If Newton owed nothing to Huygens, and he certainly owed exceedingly little, it is very probable that he was indebted in another way, for it may well have been the feeling of dissatisfaction with the position men like Huygens were reaching that drove Newton to make the new instauration Bacon had looked for a renovation of natural philosophy. The progress of scientific explanation may then be seen to be a process of leaving out redundant elements, of emancipation from imaginary qualities, until one arrives at the really successful procedure of abstraction. But Huygens was in all other senses an astoriishingly modern thinker, and he had the disposition which sets out to face things as they are which marks the man of science as much as does the possession of specialized knowledge. As a scientific researcher he was the first of a new prof.
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