Christiaan Huygens Proposes an Infinite Series of Levels to the Universe

The wave theory of light was first proposed in 1690 by Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), when he published his Traité de la Lumière [Treatise on Light¹]. In this book, Huygens proposes that the propagation of light takes place through the vibration of very fine ether particles. I intend to study this work in detail, along with the work of his successors, Thomas Young (1773-1829) and Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788-1827).

In my post Descartes’s Vortices Keep Resurfacing, I wrote that “René Descartes (1596-1650) …proposed corpuscles of three different levels of granularity, completely filling all of space, i.e., without any void, all rotating, creating vortices, which drive all motion.”

But Huygens went much further than Descartes. Huygens actually proposed an infinite series of levels of granularity! Here is a passage that I found in Chapter 1 of the Treatise on Light:

Now in applying this kind of movement to that which produces Light there is nothing to hinder us from estimating the particles of the ether to be of a substance as nearly approaching to perfect hardness and possessing a springiness as prompt as we choose. It is not necessary to examine here the causes of this hardness, or of that springiness, the consideration of which would lead us too far from our subject. I will say, however, in passing that we may conceive that the particles of the ether, notwithstanding their smallness, are in turn composed of other parts and that their springiness consists in the very rapid movement of a subtle matter which penetrates them from every side and constrains their structure to assume such a disposition as to give to this fluid matter the most overt and easy passage possible. This accords with the explanation which Mr. Des Cartes gives for the spring, though I do not, like him, suppose the pores to be in the form of round hollow canals. And it must not be thought that in this there is anything absurd or impossible, it being on the contrary quite credible that it is this infinite series of different sizes of corpuscles, having different degrees of velocity, of which Nature makes use to produce so many marvellous effects. [Chapter 1, p.14, my emphasis]

This passage is truly remarkable! Huygens is proposing that there is no basement to the universe, i.e., no matter the granularity at which the universe might be observed, no matter how fine the particles at that level might be, there will be another, finer level of granularity, with even finer particles.

Should we accept this proposal of Huygens, it can be extended in the opposite direction: we can imagine that there is no roof to the universe, and that there is an infinite series of coarser granularities, where the “particles” are larger and larger structures, such as solar systems, galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, and so on.

With these ideas, Bruno’s universe, infinite in space and time, which I have discussed in my post Giordano Bruno on the One and the Infinite, can also be understood as infinite in stratification. Truly awe-inspiring!

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1. Christiaan Huygens. Treatise on Light. In which are explained the causes of that which occurs in Reflexion, & in Refraction. And particularly in the strange Refraction of Iceland Crystal. Rendered into English By Silvanus P. Thompson. New York: Dover, 1962. First published by Macmillan and Company, Limited, in 1912.