Thomas Young

Thomas Young, English scientist

Thomas Young (June 13, 1773-May 10, 1829) was a British scientist who conclusively demonstrated many of the wave properties of light. He also was the first to decipher some of the phonetic Egyptian inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, and made a number of other contributions in physics and medicine. His life was influenced by an early Quaker upbringing, which engendered in him a sense of self-worth and confidence that enabled him to tackle the study of many fields, secure a peaceful home life and engage in productive relations with his colleagues.

Biography

Early years

Young belonged to a Quaker family of Milverton, Somerset, where he was born in 1773, the youngest of ten children of Thomas Young, Sr. and Sarah Davis. He is said to have learned to read at age two under the tutalege of his maternal grandfather. He began school at age six in Bristol, and at the age of eight, took an interest in surveying, which he learned from a neighborhood friend. From age nine to fourteen Young attended a school at Compton in Dorsetshire, and achieved a command of Greek and Latin and was acquainted with French, Italian, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Amharic. It is interesting to note that in his youth, he detested the enslavement of Africans, and as a result, refused to consume sugar produced under conditions of slavery. While at Compton, he made strides to imitate the success of others, feeling that no man is inferior to another. In equestrian sports, he failed in his first two attempts to leap over an obstacle that he saw another rider sail over with his steed, but on his third attempt, cleared the obstacle without trouble. This sense of persistence enabled him to challenge and conquer the many subjects he investigated.

At Compton, he developed a strong interest in biology. In order to more closely examine the parts of plants, he built himself a microscope, for which he taught himself advanced mathematics in order to understand manuals that described the instrument. After leaving Compton, he studied in Youngsbury under a private tutor, where he excelled in classical Greek literature. His talents being obvious to members of the British aristocracy, he was offered a career in public administration, but turned it down.

Later studies and professional career

Young began to study medicine at the Hunterian School of Anatomy in London in 1792, moved to Edinburgh in 1794, and in the same year wrote a paper on the manner in which the eye achieves focus, earning him membership in the Royal Society of London. In 1795 he studied in Göttingen, where he obtained the degree of doctor of physics, and in 1797 enrolled in Emmanuel College, Cambridge in preparation for his entry into the College of Physicians in London. In the same year he inherited the estate of his grand-uncle, Richard Brocklesby, which made him financially independent, and in 1799 he established himself as a physician at 48 Welbeck Street, London (now recorded with a blue plaque).

Young published many of his first academic articles anonymously to protect his reputation as a physician. However, his actual medical practice is said to have been rather limited, due to Young's exacting intellect and his fear that inadequate medical knowledge may lead to the wrong or improper treatment to the detriment of the patient's health. The Latin initials with which he disguised his name in the papers he published were said to be known among his friends and associates, and he later abandoned the practice of shielding his name altogether.

In 1801 Young was appointed professor of "natural 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. 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.

On June 14th 1804, Young married Eliza Maxwell, an intelligent woman who understood and supported Young's work throughout his life.

In 1811 Young became physician to St. George's Hospital, and in 1814 he served on a committee appointed to consider the dangers involved by the general introduction of gas into London. In 1816 he was secretary of a commission charged with ascertaining the length of the seconds pendulum (The length of the suspending chord required for a pendulum to achieve a back and forth sway of exactly one second), and in 1818 he became secretary to the Board of Longitude and superintendent of the HM Nautical Almanac Office. Part of this task was editing the Nautical Almanac. The production of this work became embroiled in controversy, as a number of scientists began to criticize the manner in which it was composed, and the accuracy of some of the figures contained in it. While its audience was originally the British Navy, there were those who thought it should be upgraded to a general astronomical work available to the public. The board itself could not agree on this matter, and in 1828 it was disbanded by an act of of the British Parliament. Young, however, was asked to assume the same responsibilities that he had undertaken while secretary.

A few years before his death he became interested in life assurance, and in 1827 he was chosen one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences. In the latter part of his life, he devoted his leisure to work on deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, and at the time of his passing, was at work on a dictionary of hierogphyics.

Thomas Young died in London on May 10, 1829 of an aortic blockage.

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." Albert Einstein praised him in 1931 foreword to an edition of Newton's Opticks. Other admirers include physicist Lord Rayleigh and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson.

Contributions

Eyesight and Color

Young's first submissions to the Royal Society consisted of studies on eyesight. Young was able to determine that the ability of the eye to focus on images both near and far was due to muscles surrounding the lens of the eye that changed its shape and therefore its focal length. He also developed a theory, later taken up by the physicist Hermann Von Helmholtz, that ascribed color vision to three types of receptors in the eye, each with a sensitivity to only one of the three primary colors. It wasn't until the Twentieth Century that this theory was confirmed.

The nature of light

Young's first paper on light, read to the Royal Society in 1800, focused primarily on the difficulties in explaining various phenomena from the viewpoint of the particle theory. Papers submitted to the society in 1802 and 1803 more clearly point to evidence supporting the theory that light is a wave, and not a particle.

Young's idea was simple. If light propagates like a wave, such as a wave in water, or a sound wave, then when two of the waves meet so as to reinforce each other, the light will be brighter. But if, as in other waves, they meet when the low point of one and the high point of the other coincide, the waves will interfere with each other and blot each other out.

Young did various experiments to show that this is indeed the case, the most famous of which was the passing of light through an opaque surface with a double slit to allow two beams of light to pass. Young argued that the resulting pattern of light and shadow produced by the two combined light sources demonstrated that light was a wave. He also explained the colors found at the fringes of shadows by the interference of waves, which blot out some colors of the white light, leaving other colors of the spectrum intact. In the same way he explained the colors produced when two glass plates come into contact, and many other situations that produce colored fringes, including the rainbow, as due to the wave character of ight. In 1807, Young published still another account that more clearly elucidated the wave theory of light and its applications.

Reception of Young's ideas on light

Young's theories were virtually ignored, in part because the famous scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace supported a particle theory to explain the same phenomena, and his reputation was such as to stifle the reception of any opinion that differed from his on such an important subject.

However, Augustin-Jean Fresnel's paper describing the same phenomena and submitted in 1815 to the French Academy of Sciences startled members of the society, who had evidently not noticed, Young's contribution. A team of scientists, including Francois Arago, was charged with investigating Fresnel's paper, which appeared to them to break new ground. They met with Young, and praised Fresnel's paper in his presence. Young then insisted that he had arrived at the same conclusions many years earlier and had reported them to the Royal Society. The team of scientists was skeptical, but Young's wife, who was present at this meeting, produced a volume in which Young's conclusions had been printed some years earlier. This led to Fresnel's first paper on the subject receiving less notoriety, although it did have the effect of putting the spotlight on the wave theory of light and Young's accomplishments. Only three years later, Fresnel would improve upon Young's discoveries with dramatic new evidence for the wave theory.

Young's Modulus

Young was interested in other fields of physics, including the the motion of bodies and in the properties of materials. He developed a measure, now called Young's modulus, which helps engineers and scientists measure the elasticity of materials.

Medicine

In physiology Young made an important contribution to haemodynamics in the Croonian lecture for 1808 on the "Functions of the Heart and Arteries," 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).

Languages

Young was interested in the evolution of language groups, and divided the world's languages into five major families: the Monosyllabic, the Indo-European, the Tataric, the African and the American. His thoughts on this subject were published in an article for the Quarterly Review in 1813.

Based on a work of German philologist (language scholar) Johann Christoph Adelung<<<wiki, Johann Christoph Adelung>>>, Young made a comparison of the words for heaven, sky and earth in 400 different languages, believing that these words would exist in all languages and would be the least likely to experience change. Young was not the first to promote the study of language families, although he did coin the name "Indo-European" to refer to the major European language group. The Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn as early as 1647 noted similarities between different European languages and proposed the existence of a proto-language called Scythian, from which he believed all the others were derived.

Egyptian hieroglyphs

The Rosetta Stone

Young's research into the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs was sparked by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, upon which is inscribed the same basic text written in Greek, demotic and hieroglyphics. Young was one of the first who tried to decipher hieroglyphics, building on the work of the French scholar Silvestre de Sacy and the Swedish diplomat J.D. Akerblad, who had already built up a demotic alphabet of 29 letters. But Akerblad incorrectly believed that demotic was entirely phonetic or alphabetic.

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 hieroglyphic alphabet but failed to recognize that demotic and hieroglyphic texts of the Rosetta Stone were paraphrases of the Greek and not simple translations. In 1823 he published an Account of the Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphic Literature and Egyptian Antiquities. Some of Young's conclusions appeared in the famous article "Egypt" he wrote for the 1818 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

When the French linguist Jean-François Champollion published his translation of the hieroglyphs, Young praised his work but also stated that Champollion had based his system on Young's articles and tried to have his part recognized. Said Young (1856):

Whether he (Champollion) made this discovery before I had printed my letters in the Museum Criticum in 1816, I have no means of ascertaining. I have never asked him the question, nor is it of much importance either to the world at large or to ourselves. It may not be strictly just to say that a man has no right to claim any discovery as his own till he has printed and published it, but the rule is at least a very useful one.

Champollion, however, was unwilling to share the credit. In the forthcoming schism, strongly motivated by the political tensions of that time between England and France, the British supported Young and the French Champollion. Champollion, whose complete understanding of the hieroglyphic grammar was achieved in part through better access to examples of early Egyptian documents, showed the mistakes made by Young and maintained that he had deciphered alone the hieroglyphs. This rift was partially healed when Champollion offered Young access to demotic manuscripts in the Louvre, when he was a curator there.

Specifically, Young appears to have been the first to demonstrate that inscriptions enclosed in rings or ellipses contained the name of Ptolemy. He also identified some of the symbols as relating to the feminine gender, and recognized part of the name "Cleopatra" on the stone. In order to accomplish these partial translations, he formulated a list of hieroglyphs that he believed were phonetic.

Major works

• Young, Thomas. [1807] 2002. A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts Thoemmes Press.
• Young, Thomas. 1855. Miscellaneous Works of the Late Thomas Young, M.D., F.R.S. (3 volumes). John Murray.
• Thomas Young's Life and Works [1855] 2003. Thoemmes Press ISBN 1855069725.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Arago, F. 1859. Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men. Tr. W. Smyth, B. Powell, R. Grant. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 280-329. 321.
• Kline, Daniel L. 1993. Thomas Young: Forgotten Genius. Vidan Press. ISBN 0963504606
• Robinson, Andrew. 2005. 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. New York: Pi Press ISBN 0-13-134304-1
• Whewell, William. 1858. History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time. New York: D. Appleton and Co. 2:92-102.
• 1856. The Christian Remembrancer: A Quarterly Review. London: C.& J. Mozley. 31:337-341,362-363.

External links

• ABC Radio International program (Ockham's Razor) on Thomas Young Retrieved May 20, 2007.

Reviews of The Last Man Who New Everything by Andrew Robinson

• The 'heavy sausage' denied his slice of fame by Nicholas Shakespeare in The Telegraph, September 24, 2006. Retrieved May 20, 2007.
• Master of all trades by Michael Bywater in The New Statesman, November 13, 2006. Retrieved May 20, 2007.
• The achievements of a real know-all by Simon Singh in The Telegraph, November 26, 2006. Retrieved May 20, 2007.
• Too clever by half by Rosemary Hill in The Times, December 10, 2006. Retrieved May 20, 2007.
• Reluctant polymath by PD Smith in The Guardian, January 20, 2007. Retrieved May 20, 2007.

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