1773-1829

British Physicist, Physician and Egyptologist

Thomas Young's career straddles the turn of the nineteenth century. In some ways he was an old-style natural philosopher, dabbling in many fields—physics, physiology, medicine, linguistics, navigation, insurance—and more concerned with ideas than applications. Yet, ironically, this theoretical trend also put him ahead of his scientific contemporaries; his revival of the wave theory of light was ignored for a generation. He is best remembered for his double-slit experiment demonstrating the interference of light, an absolute measure of the elasticity of solids known as Young's modulus, his optical studies, and his contribution to the deciphering of the Rosetta stone.

Born at Milverton, Somerset, England, of Quaker parents, Young was a child prodigy. He studied medicine at London, Edinburgh, Göttingen, and Cambridge universities. Young's interest in science was criticized by medical colleagues as taking time away from his medicine...