Reading The Rosetta Stone!

Young was hooked on the scripts and languages of  ancient Egypt. In 1814 he started to decipher the Rosetta Stone and he continued to study with great intensity for the rest of his life. Even tho Champollion will be the one to take the glory of it all, Thomas did make a great attempt in which he is honored for doing. In 1823, he explained his love for studying the Rosetta stone as " an attempt to unveil the mystery in which Eygptian literature has been involved for nearly twenety centeries".

The Theory Of Light and Colors!

                 In 1802 Thomas published " On The Theory Of Light And Colors" in this he put forth a theory that he later on question.. He believed that the eye had three specific receptors for three different colors it could see. Red, Yellow, and Blue. Red being the highest wavelength, would stimulate one receptor, yellow being the next wavelength would stimulate another and blue being the smallest wavelength would stimulate the third receptor. He believed to see other colors such as green the yellow and the blue receptor would be stimulated and then processed by the brain. But then he figured the three receptors were for red green and violet. However, both possibilities were slightly wrong, because Young had left out the photo-pigment sensitive to light.

This is a picture of the colors Thomas believed the Three receptors in our eyes could see!

Let There Be Light Waves

             When philosophers talk about light and waves and particles they all stood in the shadow of the great Sir Isaac Newton even tho theories on light being either a wave or particles go as far back as to the ancient Greeks. Newton however, favored the particle theory, which Mr. Young was not entirely convinced about. He read Newtons books in 1790 when he was only 17 years old. He had finally started his own investigations 7 years later in 1797. In newtons corpuscular Theory, light  was imagined to be a stream of minute particles, called corpuscles, emitted by a light source shooting through empty space like bullets and only detected when they struck the retina. He didn't go with the wave theory because he figured when light is blocked by an object the light is no longer visible to anyone in the path of the object unlike sound waves when two people behind a closed door with no visibility of each other can still hear each other, that's because sound waves bend and light doesn't therefore no light could be in waves.
              Another theory (not done by Newton but by Huygen) is that, when a light ray strikes a flat reflecting surface, such as a mirror, the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. With the law of reflection also comes the opposite. Refraction also know as, Snell's Law! This states that when light waves stike the surface of water and pass through it, the angle of incidence is different than the angle of refraction. The angle of refraction is less than the angle of incidence and the light ray is then bent toward the normal, perpendicular line. However, in Newtons day this was not all to convincing because there needed to be more physical evidence but Newton did a terrible job in trying to prove it, but Huygen on the other hand did a wonderful job. He stated that light travels slower in water than in air and he used the wave theory to prove Snell's law. Therefor disproving the Corpuscular theory.

In the early 1800's Young goes on to write and study light waves and the relation to sound waves, and he discusses them in his paper  " Sound and Light" which was read to the royal society in January of 1800.

Lets talk Eyes!

               Thomas young as i have mentioned before was very interesting in understanding the eye. He had began taking measurements on the eye to better his understanding and amazingly his measurements were extremely similar to those of today's! He wanted to see how big of a distance there was from the back retina to the cornea and he got the measurement of 91 hundredth of an inch. He discovered this is an very painful way... He turned his eye ball inward as far as it could go, and slid a ring of one key in at the back of the eye and pressed on the back of the eyeball. That pressure produced a light showing he was close to the middle of the retina. He also measured the transverse diameter which he discovered was 98 hundredth of an inch.
To better understand this he came up with four hypothesis:

1. The curvature of the cornea changes.

2. The length of the eyeball changes

3. A combination of both occurs together.

4. Shape of the crystalline lens changes.

            To test the first hypothesis he submerged his eye in water. The unaided eye can not focus in water because the light passing through the water- cornea interface into the aqueous humor is no longer refracted because the aqueous humor which is very similar to water. Young decided to put a lens in front of the eye with a refractive power to eliminate air- cornea interface to allow the eye to focus again. Thus eliminating the first hypothesis.
For the second hypothesis Young used a method that would fix the length of the eyeball mechanically so it couldn't expand or contract, then he would focus on objects at different distances. When that didn't work he ruled out this hypothesis.
The third hypothesis was automatically ruled out due to the above.
However, this led Young to believe the fourth hypothesis was the correct one. But due to a change in mind, he wasn't so sure about it either.

              

My Favorite Scientist: Thomas Young

This video is a pretty good summary of Thomas Young and all of his great achievements which are discussed through out the book!

Book Cover!

This is the cover of my book(:

Welcome To Edinburgh

Young wanted to extend his medical knowledge at a University, considering having a degree was starting to increase your job opportunities. He didnt want to go to cambridge or Oxford so he decided to mount a horse and travel to Edinburgh. The school was established in 1726 by a Mr. Alexander Monro, and it was passed down from alexander to alexander over the years being in Monro family for 120 years. Young got there on October 20 where he was just one of the 17,000 students to attend the school. The school was cheap, they didnt care which religion you were, and the lectures were in English instead of Latin. You got to chose which classes you wanted and you were only responsible for paying for them. While Young was there he had been studying the lens in eyes. He had writen a paper entitled "Observations on Vision." but due to some personal issues as well as someone else already talking about the same topic he hadnt published it. That someone was a Mr. Hunter but was talked about by Mr. Homes, even though Thomas's ideas were better and correct compared to Mr. hunter's he still backed away from publishing until later years. (will be discussed in a later post) It was just one step to showing Thomas Young's Brillance

This is a picture of a human eye, which was observed and reported about in Mr.Youngs " Observations on Vision"