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

Open any physics textbook and you will find the name of Thomas Young (1773-1829), the experimenter who first demonstrated the interference of light and proved that light is a wave, not a stream of corpuscles as maintained by Newton. Open any book on the eye and vision, and Young appears as the celebrated London physician who proposed how the eye focuses and the three-colour theory of vision, experimentally confirmed only in 1959. Open any book on ancient Egypt, and Young is credited for his crucial detective work in deciphering the Rosetta Stone and the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts. And this describes only the basics of his knowledge. Readers who enjoy David Sobel s crisp historical biography and the intellectual curiosity of Patrick O Brians Stephen Maturin will love Andrew Robinson s colourful portrayal of the last man who knew everything.