The Last Man Who Knew Everything

Bol Partner

No one has given the extraordinary Thomas Young the all-round examination he so richly deserves - until now. Celebrated biographer, Andrew Robinson portrays a man who solved mystery after mystery in the face of ridicule and rejection, and never sought fame. Physics textbooks identify Thomas Young (1773-1829) as the experimenter who first proved that light is a wave - not a stream of corpuscles as Newton proclaimed. In any book on the eye and vision, Young is the London physician who showed how the eye focuses and proposed the three-color theory of vision confirmed only in 1959. Open a book on ancient Egypt and you will find Young credited for his crucial detective work in deciphering the Rosetta Stone. It is hard to grasp how much he knew. Invited to contribute to a new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica , Young offered the following subjects: Alphabet, Annuities, Attraction, Capillary Action, Cohesion, Colour, Dew, Egypt, Eye, Focus, Friction, Halo, Hieroglyphic, Hydraulics, Motion, Resistance, Ship, Sound, Strength, Tides, Waves, and anything of a medical Nature. He asked that all his contributions be kept anonymous. While not yet thirty he gave a course of lectures at the Royal Institution covering virtually all of known science. But polymathy made him unpopular in the academy. An early attack on his wave theory of light was so scathing that English physicists buried it for nearly two decades until it was rediscovered in France. But slowly, after his death, great scientists recognized his genius. Today, in an age of professional specialization unimaginable in 1800, polymathy still disturbs us. Is this kind of curiosity selfish, even irresponsible? Either way, Young's character has a quality all but lost in our narcissistic culture. His is the story of a driven yet modest hero, someone who could make the grandiose claim to have been the last man who knew everything, but for the fact that he cared less about what others thought of him than for the joys of an unbridled pursuit of knowledge.

Bol

Three hundred years ago, it was still possible for an intelligent person to have read all of the books that constituted the whole knowledge base of the world. Three hundred years ago, most intelligent people in the world believed that the world was a holistic, living organism of some kind, imbued with mind and divinity: matter was alive (hylozoism), or mind was everywhere (panpsychism), or God was involved in everything, everywhere (theism), or God and Nature were one (pantheism). A hundred years later, the world had become immensely specialized and complex, and the world was increasingly viewed by intelligent people as a vast, purposeless, clockwork mechanism. Either there was no God (atheism), or he was an extremely remote God of Rational Laws (deism) and not of revelation and personal salvation. Leibniz was the last genius to truly know everything and to accept that the universe was an organism rather than a machine. It was a very special type of organism - a mathematical organism. Leibniz had another secret claim to fame – he was the author of the Illuminati’s Grand Unified Theory of Everything based on pure “nothing”. He created an entire universe out of a “Big Bang” singularity comprising infinite “monads” (zeros), each with infinite energy capacity. This is the story of the first mathematical Theory of Everything, which remains valid to this day as the true explanation of reality. Leibniz’s monads have one last, incredible secret to reveal: they are actually souls!