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 – Andrew Robinson (2006)
A Polymath is a person who through
experience, study, and thought becomes highly educated in a wide and seemingly
disparate variety of subjects. The
common term “Renaissance Man” implies polymathy, such as in the case of
Leonardo DaVinci, who became a master painter, engineer, sculptor, and draughtsman,
as well as being a very competent mathematician, botanist, anatomist,
geologist, and astronomer, among countless other subjects. His personal notebooks, held mainly by the
Vatican in Rome, contain the basic fruits of a deeply fertile mind, one that
was curious, flexible, and obsessive when it came to gathering
knowledge. The British physician, physicist,
mathematician, linguist, and Egyptologist Thomas Young is another such genius. He is not as famous as DaVinci, but that may
be due to the fact that much of DaVinci’s well-known work is in the form of
art, capable of being seen and understood by the whole of humanity. Thomas Young’s work was more esoteric than
DaVinci’s, and more critical to the future development of the various sciences affected
by his genius.
This book is an awesome exploration
of Thomas Young’s life, and of the way he went about his intellectual
explorations. It describes the manner by
which he became a physician, and first explaining the method by which our eye
adjusts the light entering it to project a focused image on our retina,
something no one had been able to understand before. It talks about how Thomas Young’s
explorations into light and it’s properties helped explain what we now call “polarization”
and finally proved conclusively that light/energy behaved as wave function,
something which corrected a misconception by Isaac Newton. Thomas Young learned to read and write in
many ancient languages, and it was because of this interest that he was able to
definitely prove that the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians was not just
symbolic, but also sometimes phonetic, reaching a climax when he was first able
to translate the writing on the Rosetta Stone, something that had stumped
scientists and linguists since the stone was brought back to Europe by Napoleon
several decades earlier.
When the Encyclopedia Britannica was first being put together, Thomas Young was
asked to write some articles for it. He
penned over 66 different, highly researched and informative articles on
subjects as varied as “Egypt”, “Bridges”, “Chromatics”, “Carpentry”, “Tides”, “Languages”,
“Herculaneum”, and “Weights & Measures”, many of which are still standard
texts studied by University students. These were major surveys of the then-current
state of knowledge in these fields, and in many of these articles Thomas Young actually
contributed his own original ideas and work.
He wrote over 40 biographies for the encyclopedia, on men of science
mainly. As the author states, “Very few
specialists nowadays would dare to attempt more than one, or at the most two,
such major surveys for the Encyclopedia
Britannica, even with the help of a co-author.” Thomas Young did the research, and wrote the
articles, all; while doing his other scientific explorations and lecturing at a
University. For the biographies of the
scientists he would actually read (or re-read) all of their published work, so
as to better aggregate the information for the encyclopedia. This is a man who truly loved to learn, and
whose mind could not only absorb the widest range of knowledge, but could
re-arrange it and see new worlds and ideas to explore in that knowledge.
I am personally attracted to anyone
whose willpower leads them to explore the different corners of their intellectual
curiosity. These types of humans are usually derided by their contemporaries, mainly
by denigrating their contributions to any specific field as being those of a “dilettante,”
someone who is not serious enough to spend all their time focused solely on one
field. Thomas Young’s harshest critics
were people who had labored for years on a subject, only to have Thomas Young come
by and, with his deep learning and uncommon insight, propose correct and
groundbreaking solutions to problems they had yet to even understand. He made the so-called experts appear
ignorant, or just second-rate. This bias
still exists. Many experts will dismiss
the ideas of someone who does not possess the exact same level of educational “achievement”
as them, as if someone without an advanced degree could never possibly hope to
contribute anything of value. Fucking
assholes all. It takes the waters of
time to wash away the prejudices and the biases and show the true geniuses for
what they are. The lowly minds, the second-rate
intellects, are left in the dust along with their second-rate work. The existence of men like Thomas Young only
serves to shine a light on the vacuity of the “experts” and encourages any of
us to explore what piques our curiosity, wherever that may lead.
(This book can be purchased here: The Last Man Who Knew Everything )
(This book can be purchased here: The Last Man Who Knew Everything )
