It was the fruit of the work of Thomas Young, a polymath scientist who, in addition to being a physicist, worked as a doctor, Egyptologist, linguist and physiologist.
The concept of energy has been with us since the origin of the universe, despite the fact that it is not entirely easy to understand, due to the enormous number of areas of knowledge involved in the search for its definition.
The first to propose the concept, as we know it today, was Thomas Young (1773-1829) who proposed in 1807 to use the word ‘energy’ -from the Greek en, inside, and ergon, work- to differentiate moving objects of the static ones.
This scientist was born in Milverton, in the southwest of England, into a Quaker family. At two years old he already knew how to read and at six he had read the Bible twice. A few years later he knew a dozen languages, including Latin and Greek.
He studied medicine at the prestigious University of Edinburgh where, while still a student, he discovered the way in which the lens of the eye changes shape when focusing on objects at a certain distance.
Years later, he would complete the study when he discovered that astigmatism was caused by irregularities in the curvature of the cornea, which caused light to be projected at more than one point on the retina. This explained why objects, both near and far, were perceived as misshapen and blurry.
At the age of twenty-eight, Young abandoned the practice of medicine to pursue his great passion, physics. He joined the Royal Institution of London and in just two years he delivered almost a hundred lectures.
Rosetta Stone Scholar
In 1799 Napoleonic soldiers had found a granodiorite stele known as the Rosetta stone in Egypt, which showed a decree issued by Pharaoh Ptolemy in 196 BC. C. The decree had been copied on large stone slabs -stelae- that were located in all Egyptian temples, specifically the Rosette stone was in a temple in Memphis.
When the stele was discovered, no one knew how to read hieroglyphics, however, the fact that the text appeared in three different languages (demotic, ancient Greek, and hieroglyphics) made it a highly appreciated piece by Egyptologists in their arduous journey to decipher hieroglyphics. .
In 1814 Young, after meticulous work, made remarkable progress by discovering the similarity between demotic and hieroglyphic writing, and that the latter was mixed -phonetic and logographic-. Furthermore, he managed to translate some fragments and identified the phonetic value of the proper names of the cartouches with the help of the Greek text. These wickers would allow the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion to translate the Rosetta stone in 1822.
Young opposes Newton’s theses
At the beginning of the 19th century, Young carried out an experiment with the aim of supporting the theory that light is a wave and sending to the corner of oblivion the theory that supported that light was made up of particles, as Newton had defended. To do this, the Englishman passed a beam of light through two slits and observed that a pattern with alternating bright and dark stripes was produced on a screen. These interferences could not be explained if the light was made up of particles. In this elegant way, he ended the battle between the wave phenomenon (waves) and the corpuscular phenomenon (particles).
In 2002 Robert P Crease, historian of science, conducted a survey in the magazine ‘Physics World in which he asked readers what the most beautiful experiments in physics were. Among the top five was Young’s double slit.
Today we remember this polymath scientist (from the Greek polymaths, the one who knows many things) with the name of a parameter that characterizes the behavior of an elastic material, depending on the direction in which a force is applied ( Young’s modulus ).
