Product Description
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.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 10 reviews)

Really and Truely a Man Who Knew Everything

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
November 30, 2008

It Ain't Easy Knowing Everything...

...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.
September 17, 2008

Excellent Short Scientific Biography of Thomas Young

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.
December 22, 2007

An Amazing Individual!!!

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
December 07, 2007

Only read if...

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!!!
May 18, 2007

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