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The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Genius Who Proved Newton Wrong and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Surprising Feats (2006)
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. 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.… (altro)
This is more an overview than a complete biography. Thomas Young was, depending on your viewpoint, a genius who applied his talents to anything and everything, or a dilettante who couldn't focus on a single subject. The truth, as ever, is probably somewhere in the middle. I'd heard of him in science, having covered Young's slits and Young's modulus in various physics courses as a student. Anyone with one important phenomena to his name, let alone two, clearly had some skills. And that's not the extent of his discoveries. He first proposed the three colour sensor theory of vision which wasn't proven until the mid 20th century. He was also a linguist and spoke multiple languages which contributed to his early breakthroughs in translating Egyptian hieroglyphs. Trouble is that he wasn't necessarily his own best promotor. His writing is somewhat convoluted (as was the style of tie time) and it is not always clear if he had actually performed the experiment, or merely thought his way through it. There are mixed messages as well. He was trying to set up as a doctor, so most of his early publications were anonymous, but then he tended to take exception to not being credited by later work (Champollion being the most notable example). At the end of this he remains a bit of an enigma. It spends quite a lot of time on his technical achievement and almost none on his family, his poor wife barely gets a look in. I don't feel like I know the subject much more although I know more about the subject. I think that the age of people able to become an expert in multiple broad fields has gone - and I think that's a shame in some ways. ( )
An unremarkable biography of a remarkable man. The subject is fascinating, but Robinson's writing isn't strong and the repeated cross references to topics covered elsewhere in the book got very annoying. ( )
I actually finished this book. At least, I remember moving the bookmark further and further and then not needing it anymore. This actually happened at least a year ago, and all I remember about "what I learned from this book" is that Thomas Young was smart (although I may only be recalling the title) and that the first few chapters were interesting. ( )
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"Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science! ... Nature to him was an open book, whose letters he could read without effort. ... Reflection, refraction, the formation of images by lenses, the mode of operation of the eye, the spectral decomposition and the recomposition of the different kinds of light, the invention of the reflecting telescope, the first foundations of color theory, the elementary theory of the rainbow pass by us in procession, and finally come his observations of the colors of thin films as the origin of the next great theoretical advance, which had to await, over a hundred years, the coming of Thomas Young."
--Albert Einstein, Foreword to the fourth edition of Isaac Newton's Opticks, 1931
Dedica
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For Dipli, "con amore"
Incipit
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Open any book on the science of light and vision, and you cannot miss the name of Thomas Young.
Citazioni
Ultime parole
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What is undeniable, though, is that Thomas Young really did approximate to 'the last man who knew everything' -- however much he himself would have denied this -- and we can safely say, with the endless expansion and bifurcation of knowledge, that no one will be able to stake this awesome claim ever again.
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. 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.
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(3.67)
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