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ScienceWeek
HISTORY OF PHYSICS: ON THE POLYMATH THOMAS YOUNG (1773-1829)
The following points are made by Andrew Robinson (Nature 2005 438:291):
1) Polymaths have always posed a problem in academia. How do they relate to specialization and interdisciplinarity, genius and dilettantism, inspiration and perspiration? Robert Hooke, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander von Humboldt were among those who were too academically wide-ranging for posterity to cope with, and their scientific reputations suffered as a consequence. Individual curiosity is the driving force of science, but when insatiable, can it hamper the intellectual? The life and work of the polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829) illuminates the issue perhaps more acutely than that of any other scientist. Today, views of Young span the spectrum from near-universal genius to dabbling dilettante. Those who appreciate him -- especially physicists, physiologists and Egyptologists -- admire his range, his intuition and his far-sightedness. Those who do not, depreciate these same aspects of his life and work as sloppiness and opportunism.
2) Some great names of 19th-century science, notably John Herschel, Hermann von Helmholtz and John William Strutt (Rayleigh), were in awe of Young. In 1931, Einstein paid tribute to him in a brief foreword to Newton's Opticks; he referred to Newton's observations of the colors of thin films "as the origin of the next great theoretical advance, which had to await, over a hundred years, the coming of Thomas Young." In Nature, Joseph Larmor, a former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, wrote an essay on Young calling his 1802-03 lectures on natural philosophy at the Royal Institution "the greatest and most original of all general lecture courses". In 1973, on Young's bicentenary, the Science Museum in London noted that "Young probably had a wider range of creative learning than any other Englishman in history. He made discoveries in nearly every field he studied."
3) Young made a pioneering contribution to the understanding of light by demonstrating interference patterns, known as "Young's fringes", around 1800, which led to the Young-Fresnel undulatory theory. He also formulated an important measure of elasticity, called "Young's modulus". He was the first to explain the accommodation of the eye; he discovered the phenomenon of astigmatism; and he proposed the three-color theory of vision. This was later known as the Young-Helmholtz theory, and was finally confirmed experimentally in 1959. He undertook seminal detective work on the Rosetta Stone and helped to found Egyptology. Although the credit for finally reading the hieroglyphs belongs to Jean-Francois Champollion, Young was the decipherer of the second type of Egyptian script on the Rosetta Stone, known as demotic script.
4) In addition, Young was a distinguished physician at St George's Hospital; foreign secretary of the Royal Society for a quarter of a century; an authoritative writer on all manner of subjects; a major scholar of ancient Greek; and a phenomenal linguist who coined the term "Indo-European" for the language family that includes Greek and Sanskrit. When pressed to contribute to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Young offered articles on the alphabet, annuities, attraction, capillary action, cohesion, color, dew, Egypt, the eye, focus, friction, haloes, hieroglyphics, hydraulics, motion, resistance, ships, sound, strength, tides, waves and "anything of a medical nature". And he wasn't boasting: having been an "inspector of calculations" and physician of a London-based life-insurance company in the 1820s, he knew about annuities. And his roles as adviser to the Admiralty on shipbuilding, secretary of the Board of Longitude, and superintendent of the vital Nautical Almanac from 1818 until his death had informed him on ships.
Nature http://www.nature.com/nature
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Related Material:
ON THE HISTORY OF THE PHYSICS OF LIGHT
The following points are made by F.K. Richtmyer et al (citation below):
1) The revival of the wave theory of light, begun by Thomas Young (1773-1829), is one of the most important features of the history of the 19th century. Young pointed out that the dividing of a beam of light into a refracted ray at the interface between two mediums was to be expected from the wave theory but had not been satisfactorily explained on the corpuscular theory. In 1801, he presented to the Royal Society a paper 'On the Theory of Light and Colors', in which he proposed the principle of the interference of two wave trains as an explanation of Newton's rings and the colors of thin plates.
2) From Newton's measurements of the thickness of the air layers necessary to produce the several colors, Young was enabled to compute wavelengths. In subsequent papers, he described the interference fringes which he had observed by placing hairs on silk threads in front of a narrow slit illuminated from the rear; he announced the change of phase on reflection; he explained diffraction bands by the principle of interference; and he showed that the spacing of these bands gave values of the wavelength agreeing with those obtained from Newton's rings and that, therefore, both phenomena must be due to a common cause.
3) But the dogmatic spirit in regard to scientific matters was not yet dead. Young's paper aroused a storm of protest, even of derision and abuse. He was attacked, not by the church, as was Galileo (1564-1642), but by some of his scientific, or, more probably, pseudoscientific contemporaries. His chief assailant was Henry Brougham, afterward Lord Chancellor of England, who "reviewed" Young's papers in the /Edinburgh Review/. The nature of Brougham's attack is indicated by the following quotation: "We wish to raise our feeble voice against innovations that can have no other effect than to check the progress of science and renew all those wild phantoms of the imagination which Bacon and Newton put to flight from her temple. We wish to recall philosophers to the strict and severe methods of investigation." Although Young replied at length in a privately published pamphlet, it was a long time before public opinion was willing to receive his theories with an open mind.
Adapted from: F.K. Richtmyer et al: Introduction to Modern Physics. 5th ed. McGraw-Hill 1955, p.33.
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Notes by ScienceWeek:
Thomas Young (1773-1829) was an infant prodigy who matured into an adult prodigy. At Cambridge, he was called "Phenomenon Young". He studied and practiced medicine, but failed at it because of the apparent absence of a "suave bedside manner". But while still a medical student, he was the first to discover the manner in which the lens of the eye changes shape (accommodation) in focusing on objects at differing distances. And it was Thomas Young who, in 1801, explained astigmatism as resulting from irregularities in the curvature of the cornea. The early rejection of Young's wave theory of light by his British contemporaries was due more to chauvinism than to reason: the particle theory of light was essentially British; the wave theory of light was essentially French. At the age of 41, Young abandoned both medicine and physics and devoted himself to an analysis of the Rosetta Stone. In 1818, he produced a classic paper on Egypt that laid the groundwork for the later definitive analysis of the Rosetta Stone by Jean Francois Champollion (1790-1832).
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