"The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, The Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See & Deciphered Rosetta Stone"

Overview

The biography of an individual who simply was the last man who knew everything. Open any physics textbook and you will find the name of Thomas Young (1773-1829), the experimenter who first demonstrated the interference of light and proved that light is a wave, not a stream of corpuscles as maintained by Newton. Open any book on the eye and vision, and Young appears as the celebrated London physician who proposed how the eye focuses and the three-colour theory of vision, experimentally confirmed only in 1959. Open any book on ancient Egypt, and Young is credited for his crucial detective work in deciphering the Rosetta Stone and the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts. And this describes only the basics of his knowledge. An exhibition of Young at London's Science Museum on his birth bicentenary stated that: He probably had a wider range of creative learning than any other Englishman in history . When invited to contribute to a new edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, Young offered the following subjects: Alphabet, Annuities, Attraction, Capillary Action, Cohesion, Colour, Dew, Egypt, Eye, Focusm Friction, Halo, Hieroglyphic, Hydraulics, Motion, Resistance, Ship, Sound, Strength, Tides, Waves and anything of a medical nature . But he asked that his contributions be kept anonymous, to avoid harming his medical practice. While not yet thirty he gave a course of lectures at the Royal Institution covering virtually all of known science. But polymathy made him unpopular in the academy. An early attack on his wave theory of light was so scathing that English physicists buried it for nearly two decades until it was rediscovered in France. But slowly, after his death, great scientists began to recognize his genius. Readers who enjoy David Sobel's crisp historical biography and the intellectual curiosity of Patrick O'Brians Stephen Maturin will love Andrew Robinson's colourful portrayal of the last man who knew everything.

Full Product Details

Author:   Andrew Robinson
Publisher:   Pi Press
Imprint:   Pi Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.90cm , Height: 2.60cm , Length: 23.60cm
Weight:   0.516kg
ISBN:  

9780131343047

ISBN 10:   0131343041
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   07 December 2005
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available  
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Reviews

Serviceable life of the autodidact's autodidact, bringing recognition to a chap all but forgotten for the last couple of hundred years. Thomas Young (1773-1829) was not someone you'd want to go up against on Jeopardy! Indeed, writes British science journalist Robinson, the London Science Museum opines that Young probably had a wider range of creative learning than any other Englishman in history. He made discoveries in nearly every field he studied. Among his contributions were advances in the wave theory of light, for which Young squared off against the orthodox Newtonian physicists of his day (thanks to Einstein, both Newton and Young can be viewed as sort of right), and his discovery of how the eye focuses on objects at different distances. Add to that his mastering dozens of languages, inventing the category Indo-European along the way, developing of a rule of thumb for adjusting adult dosages of medications for children's use, and inventing a method of tuning a harpsichord, and deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, and it becomes clear that Young was an uncommon force who little deserves the obscurity into which he has fallen. Save, of course, that yesterday's revolutionaries become today's establishment become tomorrow's deposed fuddy-duddies, which is just what happened; in his own time, Young, accused of committing gratuitous fictions in his work on the physics of light, lost ground to nose-to-the-grindstone types who had more patience for the hard, dull work of endless experimentation. Robinson varies, not always successfully, between dumbing down the science and plunging full-tilt into arcana, and many linguists will still want to give pride of place to Champollion on the matter of the Rosetta Stone. Still, he gives a good account of Young, who emerges in the end as something of a proto-nerd, brilliant but not much fun in company, incapable of telling a joke but able to explain the world. Solid but plodding, like its exemplary subject. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Andrew Robinson is a King's Scholar of Eton College and holds degrees from Oxford University (in science) and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. He is the author of more than a dozen books including four biographies: Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity; The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris; Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye; and Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man (written with Krishna Dutta). Since 1994, he has been the literary editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement in London.

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