Customer Reviews

The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Genius Who Proved Newton Wrong and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Surprising Feats

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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.

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.

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.

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

I have always been fascinated by Thomas Young ever since my high school physics teacher would always mention him as having an important contribution on whatever we were studying. James Burke (of Connections fame) also mentions him quite frequently.

Considering the lack of information on Thomas Young, this book is great. My only complaint is that he doesn't mention that the double slit experiment is one of the foundations of quantum mechanics. Richard Feynman, physics Nobel prize winner, said that everything always comes back to the double slit experiment. It would have been nice to give modern day examples especially since the double slit experiment with a single electron was voted the most beautiful physics experiment ever.

In Robinson's biography of Thomas Young we get an excellent picture of a scientist working in the early nineteenth century as well as the issues and difficulties faced throughout history by those who study, work and contribute knowledge in a broad range of fields and interests (otherwise known as polymaths).

As Robinson himself states in the book, the biography is not meant to be a comprehensive treatment of Young's work in all of the fields to which he contributed nor does it provide an in-depth treatment of Young's work in the areas where he was most influential. Rather, it is an overview of the breadth of Young's contributions and how these contributions came to be accepted within the scientific community of the time. This is most completely described with respect to Young's work in optics (which to the acceptance of a wave theory of light) and his work in languages, most notably hieroglyphics and demotic script.

What I found most interesting about the book was the analysis of Young's character and the advantages and disadvantages he experienced in having such a broad array of interests. The author clearly shows Young's tendency to enter a field of study, make important and sometimes ground breaking advances and then to move onto to other areas. In doing so, we see Young's habit of not rigorously working through all the details or implications of a discovery and the controversy that sometimes leads to.

The book is well written with copious quotes both from Young and his early biographers. While I found these insightful, they were often lengthy and dry and required some work to plow through. I recommend this book to all those who find themselves studying a wide array of topics, those interested in either the history of physics or linguistics and those who wish to see how a person who belongs to a rare group of individuals (polymaths) works and interacts with the learned culture around them.

Thomas Young does not get a great deal of contemporary recognition despite his tremendous contributions to many different fields such as Egyptology, linguistics, optics, physics, medicine, geology and others. This book gives some insight into how such an amazing figure could slip into popular obscurity. The author, Andrew Robinson, gives a balanced and sympathetic view of Young without overly adulating him. He puts Young's accomplishments into their proper perspective and demonstrates how he: made great leaps forward from Newton's work (the wave rather than corpuscular theory of light), made the initial steps in translating hieroglyphics, markedly improved the field of optics, elucidating how the eye focuses images on the retina, but each time was unable to receive proper credit. While some nationalistic and political reasons were given for Young's being slighted for priority, Robinson also demonstrates how Young is partly to blame since he abandoned various researches before they had been fully fleshed-out, leaving a situation wide open for others to fully capitalize on his early findings.

Throughout this book we get a fascinating glimpse into Young's genius and breathtaking drive to understand the world and everything within it. However, the lesson is clear that being correct and orginial was not enough to secure Young's deserved place in the history of science. While his accomplishements put him in the first rank of scientists and thinkers, he is rarely mentioned with the same reverence as Newton and other near-contemporaries.Young is clearly presented as a humble man without ostentatious ambitions but these qualities, along with his tendency to jump to new and interesting studies without completing prior work, that left others able to claim credit and exclude him from his due praise.

Young's difficulties in medicine, his actual career, are a very interesting since they were largely because of his scientific skills. He was willing to admit the limitations of medical interventions, making his colleagues and patients unhappy with him. Today, his demeanor as a physician would be considered praiseworthy, and his diversity of interests to be an asset rather than a distraction.

...and those who do often feel underappreciated by those who don't. Back in my rural childhood, people used "know-it-all" as a painful insult. Not on me, you understand, cuz the one thing I knew best was to keep my mouth shut and my nose in a book.

Author Andrew Robinson has organized this biography of polymath Thomas Young around the hypothesis that Young was and has been underappreciated precisely because of the diversity of his interests and the near-impossibility of anybody knowing enough to evaluate his contributions to so many different fields of knowledge. Young himself was not a boastful man; he was quite self-conscious about his propensity to switch intellectual directions, and quite modest about what he didn't know and didn't choose to learn. At a time in his life when much of his income came from writing articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica, he turned down commissions to write about subjects outside his knowledge, stone-cutting for one. But the list of his articles in the EB shows that he in fact wrote on a vast array of subjects, from bridge-building to hieroglyphics. He was easily the most prolific single contributor.

Young's most enduring contributions to knowledge - and after all, what you know is less important than what you contribute to humanity's stock of knowledge - were in the disparate fields of optics and Egyptology. His 'proving Newton wrong' refers to his demonstration that light behaves as a transverse wave rather than a 'corpuscle' as Newton insisted. Young's most impressive series of experiments concerned the anatomy and function of the eye - often risking his own eyes in the bizarre procedures available to the laboratory techniques of his era.

Robinson clearly regards his subject as a significant figure in our intellectual history who remains underappreciated. Young's personal life and his odd personality become the chief subjects of this biography, though the author analyzes Young's actual accomplishments in science clearly enough. The book falls short, not on content, but on style and organization. Frankly, when Robinson suggests that Young's writing style was less than captivating, I begin to see why the author is enamored of his subject. The book is repetitive at times, and hopscotches around Young's career so that it's easy to lose track of what-happened-in-what-order-and-when.

I have to say that, if he were alive today, Thomas Young would make a fine candidate for Vice-President. Someone who knows almost everything is surely preferable to someone who knows almost nothing except how to skin a moose.

THhomas Young is more believeable as a character in a work of fiction (comprable to a Nero Wolfe or a Sherlock Holmes) than as a real person. No one can be that smart in so many areas! But the fact that he really lived makes him all the more fantastic.

This is a great biography about an amazing man!

Also recommended: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Only read this book if you are secure with your own IQ. If you are not, you will leave feeling terribly inadequate as Thomas Young was amazingly portrayed in this book!!!