The Last Man Who Knew Everything : Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius

One of the problems with reading the biography (or writing) of a true Polymath, is that to really understand the man's undertakings you practically have to be a polymath yourself. Since Young's talents ran from optics to sound to medicine to magnetism to linguistics to force calculations, and it seems like everything in between, he is a difficult man to tie down. Robinson has done an admirable job of this though I found that some of the science was beyond me. Considered a genius even by his detractors, the one problem with Young was that HE wanted to be a successful Physician but never put enough time into his practice to be successful. Young seems to be constantly running off at tangents as to what he wants to explore. Maybe the problem of his genius was that nothing (until near the end of his life) could keep his interest long enough for him to become a true expert. He has at least four theories or theorums named after him, but he never got to the real detail in many of his ideas because once he had started on a line of inquiry that proved theoretical results he went off somewhere else. You could attribute some of his fault at non-detail to his Quaker upbringing. Quakers had little use for frivolity, ostentation or accessories. A true Quaker language would have only nouns and verbs, no reason for all those needless adjectives. In Young's writing he was consistently attacked for the 'tightness' of his writing, which sometimes was to the point of uncomprehension. To 'protect' his medical practice he wrote many of his non-medical studies anonymously and never was one to 'blow his own horn'. Unlike most men of science from his era (like Humphry or Faraday) he was never knighted because he never campaigned for it. His one controversy was over his translation of the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone. He published the first breakthrough on the meaning of some of the symbols in the 'cartouches', but because he then went off to study something else, he was surpassed by Compillion who then refused to give him credit for originally cracking the code. Young later did get credit for translating the secondary language (demotics) that took the Egyptian to Greek. Once again, had he stayed with working on the Stone he would have (or should have) broken the hieroglyphic code himself. Young was a man who couldn't learn enough, fast enough and that's what seemed to haunt him his whole life. He died at 56 and his passing was hardly noted at the time. NOTE: there are two other books with the same title (The Last Man Who Knew Everything), one on Athanasius Kircher who lived before Young and one on Joseph Leidy (who mostly work in Medicine and Paleontolgy). Neither had the scope or legacy of Young. Zeb Kantrowitz 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. 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, Colour, 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 recognized his genius. Today, in an age of professional specialization unimaginable in 1800, polymathy still disturbs us. Is this kind of curiosity selfish, even irresponsible? Here is the story of a driven yet modest hero, the last man who knew everything No one has given the polymath Thomas Young (1773–1829) 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. As a physicist, Young challenged the theories of Isaac Newton and proved that light is a wave. As a physician, he showed how the eye focuses and proposed the three-colour theory of vision, only confirmed a century and a half later. As an Egyptologist, he made crucial contributions to deciphering the Rosetta Stone. It is hard to grasp how much Young knew. This biography is the fascinating story of a driven yet modest hero who cared less about what others thought of him than for the joys of an unbridled pursuit of knowledge—with a new foreword by Martin Rees and a new postscript discussing polymathy in the two centuries since the time of Young. It returns this neglected genius to his proper position in the pantheon of great scientific thinkers. Physics textbooks identify Thomas Young (1773-1829) as the experimenter who first proved that light is a wave. Young's character has a quality all but lost in our narcissistic culture. This 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. Relates the life of the remarkable man who made major contributions in such fields as physics, languages, and music, describing how he proposed the light-wave theory and the three-color theory of vision, and was instrumental in the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone.