The experiment that changed the world was the double slit experiment.

A multidisciplinary scientist, Thomas Young worked as a physicist and doctor as well as Egyptologist, linguist and physiologist before discovering it.

The experiment that changed the world was the double slit experiment.
A multidisciplinary scientist, Thomas Young worked as a physicist and doctor as well as Egyptologist, linguist and physiologist before discovering it.

Since the beginning of time, the concept of energy has been with us, despite the fact that it is difficult to comprehend due to the many different fields of knowledge involved in its description.

Thomas Young (1773-1829) was the first to introduce the concept as we know it now when he coined the term 'energy' in 1807 to distinguish moving objects from stationary ones.

In Milverton, southwest England, this scientist was born into a Quaker family. He was able to read by the time he was two years old, and by the time he was six, he had read the Bible twice. It wasn't long after that until his knowledge of Latin and Greek had grown to a dozen.

For his doctoral work in Edinburgh's famous University of Medicine and Dentistry, he discovered how our eyes' lenses change shape when focussing on objects at specific distances.

Astigmatism was determined to be caused by corneal abnormalities, which resulted in light being projected onto the retina at more than one location. Objects near and far were distorted and hazy because of this.

Young left medicine at the age of 28 to pursue his lifelong interest for physics. He became a member of the Royal Institution of Great Britain and gave over a hundred talks in just two years.

Scholar of the Rosetta Stone
Pharaoh Ptolemy issued a decree in 196 BC, which Napoleonic soldiers discovered on the Rosetta stone in Egypt in 1799. Stone slabs (stelae) were used to record the decree, and the Rosette stone was put in a temple in Memphis.

Egyptologists were delighted to uncover the stele since it had hieroglyphics in three separate languages (demotic, ancient Greek, and hieroglyphics) that they were able to translate in their long journey to understand hieroglyphs..

In 1814, after years of painstaking research, Young discovered that hieroglyphic writing was both phonetic and logographic, and that demotic and hieroglyphic writing had many similarities. With the help of the Greek text, he was also able to translate some portions and identify the phonetic significance of the cartouches' proper names In 1822, the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion used these wickers to interpret the Rosetta stone.

There is a disagreement between Young and Newton's ideas
Newton had advocated the view that light was composed of particles, and Young set out to disprove it. The Englishman did this by shining a beam of light through two slits and observing the resulting pattern on a screen. If the light was made up of particles, these interferences would be impossible to explain. The war between waves and the corpuscular phenomenon was neatly put to rest in this elegant method (particles).

In 2002, scientific historian Robert P Crease polled readers of the magazine 'Physics World,' asking them to nominate their favorite physics experiments. Young's double slit was one of the top five finalists.

When a force is applied to an elastic material, Young's modulus is used to describe the material's behavior, depending on the direction in which the force is applied (from the Greek polymathos, meaning "one who knows many things").


Gent Flori

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