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Who was Thomas Young?
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Thomas Young (1773 to 1829) was an English doctor who showed that light behaves as a wave, with his interference experiments of the early 1800s. He also explained how we see colour, studied how the eye focuses, and made the first real progress on decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone.
How did one person start three revolutions?
Card 1 · A prodigy
Born in Somerset in 1773 to a Quaker family, Young reads early and learns a dozen languages by his twenties. He trains as a doctor in London, Edinburgh, Göttingen and Cambridge.
Card 2 · The eye
As a young man he works out how the eye's lens changes shape to focus, and he describes astigmatism.
Card 3 · Light as a wave
Around 1801 to 1803 he shows that light from two sources makes bright and dark bands, and argues that only waves can add and cancel like that. Newton's followers believed light was a stream of particles, and Young's papers get a savage anonymous review in the Edinburgh Review.
Card 4 · Three colours
He proposes that the eye sees colour with three kinds of receptors, roughly red, green and blue. He's right, and every screen you own works this way.
Card 5 · The Rosetta Stone
From 1814 he tackles the Rosetta Stone's Egyptian scripts. He works out that the oval rings (cartouches) hold royal names, reads "Ptolemy", and links signs to sounds. Jean-François Champollion completes the decipherment in 1822, building partly on Young's start, and the two men's camps argue over credit for years.
Card 6 · Everything else
He writes on tides, the elasticity of materials (engineers still use "Young's modulus"), life insurance and over 60 articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Card 7 · The last word
Young dies in 1829. A century later, quantum physics shows his waves and Einstein's particles (page 1c) are two sides of one rule (chapter 4).
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One person, three revolutions.
Young showed light is a wave, explained colour vision and began reading hieroglyphs.