Author(s): Andrew Robinson

RARE AND COLLECTIBLE | SCIENCE

Thomas Young (1773-1829) was 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 "Encyclopaedia 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, 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.

2005, First edition, first printing. A fine, as new, copy in a fine, unclipped d/w. This copy has never been read. Scans available if required.