Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton, and Pythagoras: The Energy Laboratory

Everything you need to know before you begin.

Overview

The Energy Laboratory

Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695), Pythagoras (c. 570–c. 495 B.C.), and Isaac Newton (1642–1727) lived in different times, but each searched for patterns hidden beneath familiar experiences.  Moving objects, musical sounds, and ordinary sunlight raised questions that drew them into deeper investigations.  In this unit, students meet all three within a magnificent glass building filled with plants, fountains, wind chimes, and curious instruments.  Their journey begins with a question that connects everything around them: What is energy, and how can we recognize what it does?

Students first join Huygens as he considers how energy can pass between objects or remain stored, ready to produce motion.  They will build jumping cups, compare designs, and identify where energy is stored and when it is released.  Their investigations then turn to heat and sound.  By building a thermometer, constructing a string telephone, and conducting various investigations, students will explore connections between energy and motion, heat, and sound.

Students then spend time with Pythagoras, who invites them to consider the relationship between music and the patterns of mathematics.  They will experiment with water glasses, compare notes and measurements, and observe patterns produced by sound.  

Finally, students work with Isaac Newton to study the dynamics of light.  Students separate light into its spectrum of colors, and combine those colors again.  They create a camera obscura and consider how light brings images to our eyes.

Throughout the unit, students are observing and experiencing the dynamics of energy through motion, light, heat, and sound, all the while wondering at the beautiful and mysterious dynamics that are happening around us, often ignored and unpraised.  Like the three thinkers they meet, students will discover that ordinary experiences can open onto questions far larger than they first appear.

Schedule

This unit is organized around the work of three scientists, with each scientist leading students through one or more lessons.  Lessons can usually be completed in 50–60 minutes.

Christiaan Huygens Lesson 1 – Energy and Motion

Christiaan Huygens Lesson 1 – Energy and Heat

Christiaan Huygens Lesson 1 – Energy and Sound

Pythagoras Lesson 1 – Pythagoras’ Hammers

Isaac Newton Lesson 1 – On Light

Isaac Newton Lesson 2 – On Sight

 

Materials Needed

This curriculum works best with The Laboratory: Apprentice Journal (available on Amazon here).  Each lesson includes instructions to record observations and test results in that journal. 

All lessons involve projects.  Most materials needed for these projects are common household items.  The following are less common items you will need.

  • Permanent marker
  • Colored pencils, or watercolor paints and a paintbrush
  • Cardboard boxes
  • Paper cups
  • Rubber bands
  • Tape (both heavy-duty tape, such as duct tape, and normal tape, such as Scotch tape)
  • Glue
  • Hole punch
  • Ruler
  • Yardstick (optional)
  • String
  • Nail
  • Toothpicks
  • CD or another round object of a similar size for tracing
  • Drinking glasses or Mason jars
  • Food coloring
  • Clear plastic or glass bottle
  • Clear drinking straw
  • Rubbing alcohol
  • Playdough
  • A bowl large enough to hold a Bluetooth speaker inside without the speaker rising above the rim
  • A device (such as a smartphone or computer) that can send audio to the Bluetooth speaker
  • Measuring cups
  • Plastic food wrap
  • Salt shaker with salt
  • Clock or timer for recording observations at set intervals
  • Flashlight (optional alternative for the rainbow activity)

The Lessons

Click on a lesson below to get started.

1. Christiaan Huygens – Energy and Motion

Students enter a magnificent glass building and meet Christiaan Huygens, whose swinging spheres (a Newton’s cradle) raise questions about how energy moves between objects and where it can be stored.  A story about his unusual engine leads to a challenge: build something that stores energy and releases it as motion.  Students construct jumping cups, compare their designs, and identify where energy is stored before each jump.  An optional extension invites them to build a Newton’s cradle and investigate how its marbles interact.

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2. Christiaan Huygens – Energy and Heat

Questions about Huygens’ engine lead students to investigate how we experience energy as heat. A rising thermometer introduces the idea that warmth is connected to the movement of tiny particles.  Students compare how food coloring spreads through cold, room-temperature, and hot water, recording their observations and evaluating Huygens’ explanation. They then build a simple thermometer and observe how its liquid responds to changes in temperature.

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3. Christiaan Huygens – Energy and Sound

The sound of wind chimes leads students to ask how we experience energy as sound, and discover that sound comes from vibrations traveling from an object to their ears.   With Huygens, they consider why sound needs a material through which to travel and how a voice might pass along a stretched string.  Students search their homes for vibrating sources of sound, then build a string telephone.  By changing the string’s tension, length, and contact with other objects, they investigate what helps or interferes with the transmission of sound.

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4. Pythagoras – Pythagoras’ Hammers

Students find Pythagoras resting beneath a tree, and listening to wind chimes.  He tells a story about a blacksmith’s shop, raising the question about the relationship between beautiful sounds and mathematical patterns.  Students experiment with musical water glasses, measure water amounts, and look for relationships among notes that sound pleasant together.  They also investigate Chladni plates, exploring another way vibrations can produce visible patterns.

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5. Isaac Newton – On Light

Students meet Isaac Newton studying a beam of sunlight, and they discover a rainbow shining from a prism onto his table.  His investigations into light challenge the idea that a prism creates colors and introduce the possibility that those colors were present in the light all along.  Students use a glass of water as a prism to separate sunlight, observe and record its colors, and create a spinning color wheel to explore how those colors blend.  The lesson connects Newton’s search for order in light with Pythagoras’ search for harmony in sound.

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6. Isaac Newton – On Sight

Discovering Newton’s camera obscura, students consider how light carries an image into a dark box.  Students explore how reflected light forms images and consider the similarities between the camera and the human eye.  Newton’s unsettling account of an experiment on his own eye leads to a further question about the difference between receiving light and seeing.  Students build a camera obscura, investigate how the opening affects its image, and explain why that image appears upside down.

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