Thomas Young was undoubtedly one of the greatest geniuses the world has ever seen. “The last man who knew every thing” is aptly phrased for a man who was a successful physician, physicist, musician, archeologist and adventurer. Hardly ever the world has seen such a genius.
Thomas Young was also credited with deciphering the Rosetta Stone, to understand the Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Thomas Young (13 June 1773 – 10 May 1829) was an English polymath and physician. Young made notable scientific contributions to the fields of vision, light, mechanics, energy, physiology, linguistics, music, and Egyptology. He “made a number of original and insightful innovations”in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs – the Rosetta Stone, before it was eventually expanded. He was mentioned by, among others, Maxwell and Einstein as a pioneer of several laws in physics. Young has been described as “The Last Man Who Knew Everything”
At the age of fourteen fourteen Young had learned Greek and Latin and was acquainted with French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Aramaic, Syriac , Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Amharic.
Young began to study medicine in London at St Bartholomeo’s Hospital in 1792, moved to the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1794, and a year later went to Gottingen, Lower Saxony, Germany, where he obtained the degree of doctor of medicine in 1796 from the University of Gottingen. In 1797 he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. In made him 1799 he established himself as a physician at 48 Sellback Street, London. Young published many of his first academic articles anonymously to protect his reputation as a physician.
In 1801 Young was appointed professor of philosophy (mainly physics) at the Royal Institution. In two years he delivered 91 lectures. In 1802, he was appointed foreign secretary of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow in 1794. He resigned his professorship in 1803, fearing that its duties would interfere with his medical practice. His lectures were published in 1807 in the Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and contain a number of anticipations of later theories.
In 1811 Young became physician to St George Hospital, and in 1814 he served on a committee appointed to consider the dangers involved in the general introduction of gas into London. In 1816 he was secretary of a commission charged with ascertaining the precise length of the second’s or seconds pendulum (the length of a pendulum whose period is exactly 2 seconds), and in 1818 he became secretary to the Board of Longitude and superintendent of the Her Majesty Natural Almanac Registry.
A few years before his death he became interested in life insurance and in 1827 he was chosen oFrench Academy of Sciencesne of the eight foreign associates of the . In 1828, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Sacred to the memory of Thomas Young, M.D., Fellow and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society Member of the National Institute of France; a man alike eminent in almost every department of human learning. Patient of unintermitted labour, endowed with the faculty of intuitive perception, who, bringing an equal mastery to the most abstruse investigations of letters and of science, first established the undulatory theory of light, and first penetrated the obscurity which had veiled for ages the hieroglyphs of Egypt. Endeared to his friends by his domestic virtues, honoured by the World for his unrivalled acquirements, he died in the hopes of the Resurrection of the just. — Born at Milverton, in Somersetshire, 13 June 1773. Died in Park Square, London, 10 May 1829, in the 56th year of his age.
Later scholars and scientists have praised Young’s work although they may know him only through achievements he made in their fields. His contemporary Sir John Herschel called him a “truly original genius”.
Einstein praised him in the 1931 foreword to an edition of Newton’s Opticks. Other admirers include physicist Lord Raleigh and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson.
Young’s research included wave theory of light breaking centuries old assumptions. In Young’s own judgment, of his many achievements the most important was to establish the wave theory. To do so, he had to overcome the century-old view, expressed in the venerable Isaac Newton’s “Opticks”, that light is a particle.
Young’s modulus, which is an integral part of material science and metallurgy was first determined by him. Young described the characterization of elasticity that came to be known as Young’s modulus, denoted as E, in 1807, and further described it in his Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts.
His work on light, vision and ophthalmology was nothing less awe-inspiring. Young has also been called the founder of physiological optics. In 1793 he explained the mode in which the eye accommodates itself to vision at different distances as depending on change of the curvature of the crystalline lens; in 1801 he was the first to describe astigmatism.
Young’s work of surface tension and Young Laplace theory still holds good. In 1804, Young developed the theory of capillary phenomena on the principle of surface tension. He also observed the constancy of the angle of contact of a liquid surface with a solid, and showed how from these two principles to deduce the phenomena of capillary action.
His excellence in medical practice never suffered despite his involvement in different fields.
In physiology Young made an important contribution to hemodynamics in the Croonian lecture for 1808 on the “Functions of the Heart and Arteries,” where he derived a formula for the wave speed of the pulse and his medical writings included An Introduction to Medical Literature, including a System of Practical Nosology (1813) and A Practical and Historical Treatise on Consumptive Diseases (1815).
Young devised a rule of thumb for determining a child’s drug dosage. Young’s Rule states that the child dosage is equal to the adult dosage multiplied by the child’s age in years, divided by the sum of 12 plus the child’s age.
He was one of the biggest contributors, though anonymous, to Encyclopaedia Britannica. In his Encyclopædia Britannica article “Languages”, Young compared the grammar and vocabulary of 400 languages. In a separate work in 1813, he introduced the term Indo-European languages, 165 years after the Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Boxhorn proposed the grouping to which this term refers in 1647.
When Egyptian hieroglyphics was a mystery, he solved the Rosetta Stone. By 1814 Young had completely translated the “enchorial” (demotic, in modern terms) text of the Rosetta Stone (he had a list with 86 demotic words), and then studied the hieroglyphics but initially failed to recognise that the demotic and hieroglyphic texts were paraphrases and not simple translations.
In music, he developed Young temperament, a method of tuning musical instruments to pure notes.
His last words were, “I have resolved to confine my studies and my pen to medical subjects only. For the talents which God has not given me, I am not responsible, but those which I possess, I have hitherto cultivated and employed as diligently as my opportunities have allowed me to do ; and I shall continue to apply them with assiduity, and in tranquillity, to that profession which has constantly been the ultimate object of all my labours.”
Will the world be able to see another like of Thomas Young????
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