The Last Man Who Knew Everything
Andrew Robinson Oneworld, 288pp, £17.99
ISBN 1851684948
Andrew Robinson's book is the intellectual biography of Thomas Young, "the anonymous polymath who proved Newton wrong, explained how we see, cured the sick, and deciphered the Rosetta Stone" - to quote the delightful, if hyperbolic, subtitle. But before we get on to its hyperbole, our hackles are already up, bristling at the word "polymath".
We don't like polymaths any more. Perhaps it's because even being a monomath is too difficult now; even specialists specialise only in a small subset of their specialty, and learning is an either/or business. The wave/particle duality of light or the practice of medicine, but not both. Making a serious breakthrough in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs or serving with distinction on the Board of Longitude, but not both. That's the modern way.
Thomas Young, who lived from 1773 to 1829, felt no such constraints. While he may not have been the last "man who knew everything", he made significant progress in the fields of Egyptology, optics and the physics of light, and serious contributions to many other disciplines.
He began young. In 1793, aged just 20, he read a paper to the Royal Society on the way the eye accommodates to different focal distances, which, despite an anatomical error relating to how the trick is done, resolved the problem: the eye alters the curvature of its lens (a trick it loses over time, as anyone who has found themselves tromboning a book to get it into focus will know). His experiments (more in the way of "thought experiments" than actual, practical laboratory work) with interference patterns and what are still known as "Young's slits" led him to favour the wave theory of light over the then orthodox, but problematic, "corpuscular" theory promulgated by Newton. We now model light as a strange duality, both particle and wave. But a young physician taking on the great Newton himself? Unthinkable today - until, perhaps, we recall Einstein working in the patent office.
In Egyptology, too, Young was a pioneer. In helping to decode the hieroglyphics of the Rosetta Stone, he again revealed himself to be not a dilettante, but a true polymath. His contribution to its decryption was the result of close observation, careful thought, a tremendous amount of background reading and knowledge, and a lucky guess. The prevailing belief was that hieroglyphics were a pictographic writing, wholly non-phonetic, its symbols representing concepts. Others, beginning with William Warburton in 1740, suggested that while the hieroglyphs might have originally been ideographs, they had become "alphabetic". Young hit upon a new notion, largely by painstaking (pathemata mathemata) comparison of the demotic or "enchorial" script with the hieroglyphs it sketchily represented. He wrote to a fellow decoder, Sylvestre de Sacy in Paris, of the "despair of the possibility of discovering a [demotic] alphabet" and added: "If you wish to know my 'secret', it is simply this, that no such alphabet ever existed . . . [the demotic script is] imitations of the hieroglyphs . . . mixed with letters of the alphabet."
The next discovery was not Young's, but Jean-François Champollion's: that the hieroglyphic script was also a mixed script, just like the demotic. Battles then followed between Young and Champollion - utterly modern-sounding intellectual wranglings, a mixture of scholarship and personal animus - but Young's contribution was safe in the eye of history.
This might have been enough for any one life, but Robinson's tale continues and expands. As well as Young's modulus - still the engineer's touchstone of elasticity - and his work as superintendent of the Board of Longitude until its scandalous dissolution by (needless to say) the politicians, he kept up his medical practice, went on a Grand Tour (during which he diligently copied hieroglyphs) and contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica on bridge, carpentry, chromatics, cohesion, Egypt, Herculaneum, tides and weights and measures, not to mention 23 biographies and other articles on, inter alia, annuities (on which he advised life-insurance companies and did quite well), bathing, road-making and the polarisation of light.
We shall not see his like again. It wouldn't be allowed, apart from anything else. But amid all this intellectual toil and ferment, the one thing missing is a sense of Young the man. He was allegedly humourless; his responses to the beauties and wonders of his Grand Tour are formulaic; his letters to friends are strangely formal. It perhaps says more about us than about him that we want to know what he was like, a question even Robinson can't answer. Probably, now, we'd have him down as an Asperger chappie, and congratulate ourselves on diagnosing him into a calculable box. A better conclusion might simply be si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Young would have appreciated the pun.
Michael Bywater's "Big Babies. Or: why can't we just grow up?" is published by Granta
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