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Here is the story of an amazing character
at a turning point in the history of knowledge. No one has
given the extraordinary Thomas Young the all-round examination
he so richly deserves -- until now. Celebrated biographer
Andrew Robinson portrays a man who solved mystery after
mystery in the face of ridicule and rejection, and never
sought fame.
Was Young really the last man who knew everything?
Physics textbooks identify Thomas Young (1773-1829) as the
experimenter who first proved that light is a wave -- not
a stream of corpuscles as Newton proclaimed. In any book
on the eye and vision, Young is the London physician who
showed how the eye focuses and proposed the three-color
theory of vision -- confirmed only in 1959. Then again,
in any book on ancient Egypt, Young is credited for his
crucial detective work in deciphering the Rosetta Stone.
It is hard to grasp how much he knew.
Invited to contribute to a new edition of
the Encyclopedia Britannica, Young offered the following
subjects: Alphabet, Annuities, Attraction, Capillary Action,
Cohesion, Color, Dew, Egypt, Eye, Focus, Friction, Halo,
Hieroglyphic, Hydraulics, Motion, Resistance, Ship, Sound,
Strength, Tides, Waves, and "anything of a medical
nature." He asked that all his contributions be kept
anonymous.
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.
Today, in an age of professional specialization
unimaginable in 1800, polymathy still disturbs us. Is this
insatiable curiosity selfish or even irresponsible? Either
way, Young's character has a quality all but lost in our
narcissistic culture. Here is the story of a driven yet
modest hero, someone who could make the grandiose claim
to have been the last man who knew everything, but for the
fact that he cared less about what others thought of him
than for the joys of an unbridled pursuit of knowledge.
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 Robindranath
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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