Thomas Young

Thomas Young was born on 13 June 1773 in Britain, and from the start his mind refused to stay in one field. He worked across vision, solid mechanics, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology with equal rigor. His decipherment work on the Rosetta Stone unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs for the modern world. Against Isaac Newton's corpuscular theory, he revived and established Christiaan Huygens' wave theory of light — a position later bolstered by Augustin-Jean Fresnel's work. His ideas on energy and optics fed directly into the thinking of William Herschel, Hermann von Helmholtz, Jame…