- Robinson, Andrew.
The Last Man Who Knew Everything.
New York: Pi Press, 2006.
ISBN 0-13-134304-1.
-
The seemingly inexorable process of specialisation in
the sciences and other intellectual endeavours—the
breaking down of knowledge into categories so narrow and
yet so deep that their mastery at the professional level
seems to demand forsaking anything beyond a layman's competence
in other, even related fields, is discouraging to those who
believe that some of the greatest insights come from the
cross-pollination of concepts from subjects previously
considered unrelated. The twentieth century was
inhospitable to polymaths—even within a single field
such as physics, ever narrower specialities proliferated,
with researchers interacting little with those working in
other areas. The divide between theorists and experimentalists
has become almost impassable; it is difficult to think of a
single individual who achieved greatness in both since
Fermi, and he was born in 1901.
As more and more becomes known, it is inevitable that it is
increasingly difficult to cram it all into one human skull,
and the investment in time to master a variety of topics
becomes disproportionate to the length of a human life,
especially since breakthrough science is generally the
province of the young. And yet, one wonders whether the
conventional wisdom that hyper-specialisation is the only way
to go and that anybody who aspires to broad and deep
understanding of numerous subjects must necessarily be a
dilettante worthy of dismissal, might underestimate the human
potential and discourage those looking for insights available
only by synthesising the knowledge of apparently unrelated
disciplines. After all, mathematicians have repeatedly
discovered deep connections between topics thought completely
unrelated to one another; why shouldn't this be the case in
the sciences, arts, and humanities as well?
The life of Thomas Young (1773–1829) is an inspiration to
anybody who seeks to understand as much as possible about the world
in which they live. The eldest of ten children of a middle class Quaker
family in southwest England (his father was a cloth merchant and later
a banker), from childhood he immersed himself in every book he could
lay his hands upon, and in his seventeenth year alone, he read
Newton's Principia
and Opticks, Blackstone's
Commentaries,
Linnaeus,
Euclid's Elements,
Homer,
Virgil, Sophocles, Cicero, Horace, and many other classics
in the original Greek or Latin. At age 19 he presented a paper
on the mechanism by which the human eye focuses on objects at
different distances, and on its merit was elected a Fellow of
the Royal Society a week after his 21st birthday.
Young decided upon a career in medicine and studied in
Edinburgh, Göttingen, and Cambridge, continuing his
voracious reading and wide-ranging experimentation in whatever
caught his interest, then embarked upon a medical practice in
London and the resort town of Worthing, while pursuing his
scientific investigations and publications, and popularising
science in public lectures at the newly founded Royal
Institution.
The breadth of Young's interests and contributions have
caused some biographers, both contemporary and especially more
recent, to dismiss him as a dilettante and dabbler, but
his achievements give lie to this. Had the Nobel Prize existed
in his era, he would almost certainly have won two (Physics for
the wave theory of light, explanation of the phenomena of
diffraction and interference [including the double slit
experiment], and birefringence and polarisation; plus
Physiology or Medicine for the explanation of the focusing
of the eye [based, in part, upon some cringe-inducing experiments
he performed upon himself], the trireceptor theory of colour
vision, and the discovery of astigmatism), and possibly
three (Physics again, for the theory of elasticity of materials:
“Young's modulus” is a standard part of the
engineering curriculum to this day).
But he didn't leave it at that. He was fascinated by languages
since childhood, and in addition to the customary Latin and Greek,
by age thirteen had taught himself Hebrew and read thirty chapters
of the Hebrew Bible all
by himself. In adulthood he undertook an analysis of four
hundred different languages (pp. 184–186) ranging
from Chinese to Cherokee, with the goal of classifying them
into distinct families. He coined the name
“Indo-European” for the group to which most
Western languages belong. He became fascinated
with the enigma of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and his work on the
Rosetta Stone provided the first breakthrough and the crucial
insight that hieroglyphic writing was a phonetic alphabet, not
a pictographic language like Chinese. Champollion built upon
Young's work in his eventual deciphering of hieroglyphics. Young
continued to work on the fiendishly difficult demotic script,
and was the first person since the fall of the Roman Empire to
be able to read some texts written in it.
He was appointed secretary of the Board of Longitude and
superintendent of the Nautical Almanac, and was
instrumental in the establishment of a Southern Hemisphere
observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. He consulted with the
admiralty on naval architecture, with the House of Commons on
the design for a replacement to the original London Bridge,
and served as chief actuary for a London life insurance company
and did original research on mortality in different parts of
Britain.
Stereotypical characters from fiction might cause you to expect
that such an intellect might be a recluse, misanthrope,
obsessive, or seeker of self-aggrandisement. But no…,
“He was a lively, occasionally caustic letter writer,
a fair conversationalist, a knowledgeable musician, a
respectable dancer, a tolerable versifier, an accomplished
horseman and gymnast, and throughout his life, a participant
in the leading society of London and, later, Paris, the intellectual
capitals of his day” (p. 12). Most of the numerous
authoritative articles he contributed to the
Encyclopedia Britannica, including “Bridge”,
“Carpentry”, “Egypt”,
“Languages”, “Tides”, and
“Weights and measures”, as well as 23
biographies, were published anonymously. And he was happily
married from age 31 until the end of his life.
Young was an extraordinary person, but he never seems to have thought
of himself as exceptional in any way other than his desire to
understand how things worked and his willingness to invest as much
time and effort as it took at arrive at the goals he set for himself.
Reading this book reminded me of a remark by Admiral Hyman G.
Rickover, “The only way to make a difference in the world is to
put ten times as much effort into everything as anyone else thinks is
reasonable. It doesn't leave any time for golf or cocktails, but it
gets things done.” Young's life is a testament to just how many
things one person can get done in a lifetime, enjoying every minute of
it and never losing balance, by judicious application of this
principle.
March 2007 