Sterne's Miscellaneous Works

Sterne, Laurence; New, Melvyn; Gerard, W. B.

doi:10.1093/oseo/instance.00173059

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“…And yet it is possible to explain in this theory a transverse vibration, propagated also in the direction of the radius, and with equal velocity, the motions of the particles being in a certain constant direction with respect to that radius; and this is a polarization. [323] The key word here is transverse; we should not bother too much about the precise wording of the rest of Young's explanation (which again drags in an analogy with sound). A water wave is a transverse vibration; a sound wave is not-it is longitudinal.…”

Section: Waves Of Enlightenmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

9. Dr Thomas Young, M.D., F.R.C.P.

Robinson¹

2023

The Last Man Who Knew Everything

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Versatile people have always fascinated me as a biographer. Most recently, there was Albert Einstein, who, as everyone knows, fathered diverse new fields of science, but who also influenced some crucial areas of international politics. Before Einstein, Michael Ventris, a professional architect who in his spare time deciphered Linear B, the earliest readable European writing system, and became revered by archaeologists. And before Ventris, two prodigious Indians, the Nobel-prize-winning writer Rabindranath Tagore and the Oscar-winning film-maker Satyajit Ray, both of whom were intensely creative in areas outside literature and cinema.But I must admit that Thomas Young (1773-1829), for sheer range of expertise, beats them all. Not only did he make pioneering contributions to physics (the wave theory of light) and engineering (the modulus of elasticity), to physiology (the mechanism of vision) and to Egyptology (the decipherment of the hieroglyphs), but he was also a distinguished physician, a major scholar of ancient Greek, a phenomenal linguist, and an authoritative writer on all manner of other subjects, from carpentry and music to life insurance and ocean tides. In an exhibition on Young arranged by London's Science Museum for his bicentenary in 1973, the organisers went so far as to state: 'Young probably had a wider range of creative learning than any other Englishman in history. He made discoveries in nearly every field he studied'. [1] This makes Young a tough subject for a biographer, and perhaps that is why there appeared no new biography of him for half a century. I contemplated writing one for over a decade, after first encountering Young while researching a book, The Story of Writing, and I became further committed to the idea while writing another book, Lost Languages, on archaeological decipherment, a few years later. But having thought about the challenge, I decided it would be better to write an

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Section: Waves Of Enlightenmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

9. Dr Thomas Young, M.D., F.R.C.P.

Robinson¹

2023

The Last Man Who Knew Everything

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Sterne's Miscellaneous Works

Cited by 1 publication

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9. Dr Thomas Young, M.D., F.R.C.P.

9. Dr Thomas Young, M.D., F.R.C.P.

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