See also: 1677 in science, other events of 1678, 1679 in science and the list of years in science.

Table of contents

1 Astronomy 2 Physics 3 Births 4 Deaths

Astronomy

• Edmund Halley publishes a catalogue of 341 southern stars - the first systematic southern sky survey

• Christiaan Huygens publishes his Traité de la Lumière/Treatise on Light, which states his principle of wavefront sources
• Robert Hooke discovers the fundamental law of elasticity when he finds that the stress (force) exerted is proportional to the strain (elongation) produced