Things just happen?

Christiaan Huygens (1629 - 1695)

I always wondered how such a small country as the Netherlands could transform themselves suddenly to a seafaring nation and a superpower from the 17 century onwards. Sieving through its history, one can find that it was paved with many upheavals and uprisings. Lord Burgundy is credited for uniting regions around Holland, Luxemburg and Belgium. Protestants, who were protesting silently against the tyranny of control of the Roman Catholic Church and congregated around the Netherlands, declared themselves as a Republic as the Spanish kingdom became weaker.

With superstition and dogma out of the way, with science as the guiding light, the people of the Netherlands prospered. Encouraging citizens to think, speak and not be ostracised for out-of-the-box ideas, scientists prospered. They had entered the golden age of their existence. With advances in science, in particular astronomy and navigational knowhows, they went places. Improvement in optics opened their vision to spaces far and beyond. 

The single icon which is often mentioned in Netherland during this era is Christiaan Huygens. Huygens was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer and inventor extraordinaire. He is credited for the invention of the pendulum clock, studies in mechanics, light, the discovery of Saturn ring and its moon Titan as well as work in probability.

It must have been a composite of things that brought all the changes in that nation. The fact that there was a genius being born in a place where thinking was allowed, away from the thought-controlling milieu of the Roman Catholic countries. The presence of other same minded and complementary figures also must have made their impact. Like a soup of possibilities, everything just happened to fall just nicely at the right place and right time. Only by chance. I do not think the divine forces ordained such a phenomenon as it allegedly occurred in a so-called 'renegade' state.

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