Thomas Young (scientist)

Thomas Young (June 13, 1773 – May 10, 1829) was an English scientist, researcher, physician and polymath. He is sometimes considered to be "the last person to know everything": that is, he was familiar with virtually all the contemporary Western academic knowledge at that point in history. Clearly this can never be verified, and other claimants to this title are Gottfried Leibniz, Leonardo da Vinci, and Francis Bacon, among others. Young also wrote about various subjects to contemporary editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His learning was so prodigious in scope and breadth that he was popularly known as "Phenomenon Young."

Biography

Young belonged to a Quaker family of Milverton, Somerset, where he was born in 1773, the youngest of ten children. At the age of fourteen Young had learned Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Amharic..

Young began to study medicine in London in 1792, moved to Edinburgh in 1794, and a year later went to Göttingen, where he obtained the degree of doctor of physics in 1796. In 1797 he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In the same year he inherited the estate of his grand-uncle, Richard Brocklesby, which made him financially independent, and in 1799 he established himself as a physician in Welbeck Street, London. Young published many of his first academic articles anonymously to protect his reputation as a physician.

In 1801 Young was appointed professor of "natural philosophy" (mainly physics) at the Royal Institution. In two years he delivered 91 lectures. In 1802, he was appointed foreign secretary of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow in 1794. He resigned his professorship in 1803, fearing that its duties would interfere with his medical practice. His lectures were published in 1807 in the Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and contain a number of anticipations of later theories.

In 1811 Young became physician to St. George's Hospital, and in 1814 he served on a committee appointed to consider the dangers involved by the general introduction of gas into London. In 1816 he was secretary of a commission charged with ascertaining the length of the seconds pendulum, and in 1818 he became secretary to the Board of Longitude and superintendent of the HM Nautical Almanac Office.

A few years before his death he became interested in life assurance, and in 1827 he was chosen one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences.

Thomas Young died in London on May 10, 1829.

Later scholars and scientists have praised Young's work although they may know him only though achievements he made in their fields. His contemporary Sir John Herschel called him a "truly original genius". Albert Einstein praised him in 1931 foreword to an edition of Newton's Opticks. Other admirers include physicist Lord Rayleigh and Nobel laureate Phillip Anderson.

Research

Double-slit experiment

In physics, Young is perhaps best known for his work in physical optics, as the author of series of research which did much to establish the wave theory of light, and as the discoverer of the interference of light. In Young's double-slit experiment, c. 1801, he passed a beam of light through two parallel slits in an opaque screen, forming a pattern of alternating light and dark bands on a white surface beyond. This led Young to reason that light was composed of waves. (See also Newton wave-particle duality)

Young's modulus

Young also devised Young's modulus, a measure of the stiffness of a material.

Vision and colour theory

Young has also been called the founder of physiological optics. In 1793 he explained the mode in which the eye accommodates itself to vision at different distances as depending on change of the curvature of the crystalline lens; in 1801 he was the first to describe astigmatism; and in his Lectures he presented the hypothesis, afterwards developed by Hermann von Helmholtz, that colour perception depends on the presence in the retina of three kinds of nerve fibres which respond respectively to red, green and violet light. This theory was experimentally proved 1959.

See also Young-Helmholtz theory

Medicine

In physiology Young made an important contribution to haemodynamics in the Croonian lecture for 1808 on the "Functions of the Heart and Arteries," and his medical writings included An Introduction to Medical Literature, including a System of Practical Nosology (1813) and A Practical and Historical Treatise on Consumptive Diseases (1815).

Languages

Young compared grammar and vocabulary of 400 languages, In 1813 he introduced the term Indo-European languages.

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Young was also one of the first who successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics; by 1814 he had completely translated the "enchorial" (demotic, in modern terms) text of the Rosetta Stone, and a few years later had made considerable progress towards an understanding of the hieroglyphic alphabet. In 1823 he published an Account of the Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphic Literature and Egyptian Antiquities. Some of Young's conclusions appeared in the famous article "Egypt" he wrote for the 1818 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

When the French linguistic Jean-Francois Champollion published his translation of the hieroglyphs, Young praised his work but also stated that Champollion had based his system on Young's articles and wanted that his part should be recognized. Champollion, however, was unwilling to share the credit. In the forthcoming schism, the British supported Young and the French Champollion. Champollion maintained that he had deciphered the hieroglyphs. However, after 1824, he did offer Young access to demotic manuscripts in the Louvre, when he was a curator there.

Selected writings of Thomas Young

A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical arts (1807, republished 2002 by Thoemmes Press).
Miscellaneous Works of the Late Thomas Young, M.D., F.R.S. (1855, 3 volumes, editor John Murray, republished 2003 by Thoemmes Press).

References

Andrew Robinson, Thomas Young: The man who knew everything (History Today April 2006).

Books

Andrew Robinson, Thomas Young, The Last Man Who Knew Everything (Pi Press 2006) ISBN 0131343041.

External Links

ABC Radio International program (Ockham's Razor) on Thomas Young -- available for download and streaming (as of July 9, 2006)

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