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 [Hardcover]

Andrew Robinson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0131343041 | ISBN-13: 978-0131343047 | Publication Date: December 7, 2005 | Edition: First Printing

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The subtitle is an outline for the book's contents: 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. Born a half century after Newton's death, Young (1773–1829) disproved the great scientist's theory of light, demonstrating with a now-classic refraction experiment that light travels in waves. He showed how the eye is able to change its depth of focus by becoming more or less convex, and was the first to conceive the correct theory of color vision (which wasn't proved experimentally until 1959) and to accurately explain colorblindness and astigmatism. In between all of this, he was a practicing doctor and made substantial contributions to translating the Rosetta Stone. In our age of specialization, it's inconceivable that one man could make breakthroughs in so many different fields; toward the end of his life, Young wrote 63 articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Robinson (The Story of Writing) shines a light on this largely forgotten polymath, relying on Young's letters and writings as well as substantial works by his contemporaries to put Young's achievements in context. This thoroughly researched biography is as scattered in topics as Young's varied interests, but Robinson successfully portrays a genius who lived in a time when the fields of knowledge were fertile for new discoveries. (Jan.)
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About the Author

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 Rabindranath 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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Pi Press; First Printing edition (December 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131343041
• ISBN-13: 978-0131343047
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #522,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Little Dry, But Worth the Science, October 19, 2006

By 

R. Schultz (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 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 (Hardcover)

There isn't a great deal of personal, emotional information about Thomas Young, the title polymath here. But then his life was mostly in his work. And there is a lot to be learned following Thomas' investigations of a variety of scientific and scholarly subjects.

His range truly was amazing. How did people accomplish so much in previous centuries? Well, I suppose without TV to suck away time... But Thomas was exceptional even for his overachieving, turn-of-the-18th-century age. And this biography allows a reader to follow in the path of his curiosity - about how the eye works, about the nature of light, about Egyptian writing.

The biographer's descriptions of Thomas' researches into the physiology of the human eye can get pretty gruesome. These pages are not for the squeamish. Thomas often used himself as subject, probing his own eye socket to get to the bottom of things.

The section on his investigations into light is really enlightening and presents some of the clearest descriptions I've read of the split-screen diffraction experiment. This experiment was key in leading Thomas to his pioneering proposition that light is wave-like in nature.

And then the section on his work translating the Rosetta Stone was news to me! I had always assumed that ancient Egyptian hieroglyph writing was a form of picture writing like Chinese, with each symbol representing a whole word. But Thomas' break-through lay in the realization that the Egyptian symbols were actually largely like our modern English alphabet - that each symbol represented a sound, a phoneme. And so he gave us the key to reading the inscriptions on the ancient Egyptian tombs and obelisks.

The writing here is generally clear and will keep you turning page by page, tracking Thomas' investigations as he unlocks one mystery after another.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Snapshot of Thomas Young's Life and Work, April 26, 2006

By 

G. Poirier (Orleans, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 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 (Hardcover)

Although, as specified by the author, this is not meant to be a full biography of Thomas Young, this book certainly does give the reader an excellent perspective of the man, his many activities and his times. Any meaningful sketch of Thomas Young would need to include, amongst many other topics, some discourse on his work in physics, particularly the wave properties of light. This book certainly includes such discussions. The author has the ability to present physical principles with the utmost clarity - something that is, most unfortunately, lacking in many a scientific paper. I was not aware that Thomas Young was involved in so many fields, including Egyptology. In particular, I have always been under the erroneous impression that the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone was solely the work of Champollion; this book sets the record straight on that matter. The book is well-written and should be accessible to everyone. It would make a valuable addition to any library, particularly one leaning towards topics pertaining to the history of science.

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars you might not like this book, June 9, 2006

By 

Russell A. Carleton - See all my reviews
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This review is from: 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 (Hardcover)

If you're already intrigued by the concept of polymathy (a man who studies and works in many different subjects), were a triple major with two minors in college, or have a general interest in Thomas Young, you'll come away from this satisfied. Young's a fascinating guy, and given the task of understanding a man who worked in such varied areas, Robinson does a decent job writing his biography, or perhaps more properly, measuring and framing Young's contributions in the various subjects listed on the cover. The problem is that I don't think this book would cross over to a general audience that doesn't fit one of the above criteria. But then again, I could be wrong.