Thomas young

PHYSICIST NAME: Thomas young
STUDENT NAME: Angela Mari Peralta

BIOGRAPHY

THOMAS YOUNG (June 13, 1773 – May 10, 1829) was an English scientist, researcher, physician and polymath. He is sometimes considered to be "the last person to know everything": that is, he was familiar with virtually all the contemporary Western academic knowledge at that point in history. He belong to a Quaker family of Milverton, Somerset, where he was born in 1773, and he was the youngest of the ten children.

At the age of fourteen he was acquainted with Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Amharic. Beginning to study medicine in London in 1792, he removed to Edinburgh in 1794, and a year later went to Göttingen, where he obtained the degree of doctor of physic in 1796. In 1797 he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In the same year the death of his grand-uncle, Richard Brocklesby, made him financially independent, and in 1799 he established himself as a physician in Welbeck Street, London.

Appointed in 1801 professor of physics at the Royal Institution, in two years he delivered ninety-one lectures. These lectures, printed in 1807 (Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy), contain a remarkable number of anticipations of later theories. He resigned his professorship in 1803, fearing that its duties would interfere with his medical practice.

In the previous year he was appointed foreign secretary of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow in 1794. In 1811 he became physician to St George's Hospital, and in 1814 he served on a committee appointed to consider the dangers involved by the general introduction of gas into London. In 1816 he was secretary of a commission charged with ascertaining the length of the seconds pendulum, and in 1818 he became secretary to the Board of Longitude and superintendent of the Nautical Almanac.

A few years before his death he became interested in life assurance and in 1827 he was chosen one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences. He died in London on May 10, 1829.

CONTRIBUTIONS

In the early 1800's, Thomas Young conducted his experiment. He allowed light to pass through a slit in a barrier so it expanded out in wave fronts from that slit as a light source. That light, in turn, passed through pair of slits in another barrier (carefully placed the right distance from the original slit). Each slit, in turn, diffracted the light as if they were also individual sources of light. The light impacted an observation screen. This is shown to the right.

When a single slit was open, it merely impacted the observation screen with greater intensity at the center and then faded as you moved away from the center. There are two possible results of this experiment

Particle interpretation: If light exists as particles, the intensity of both slits will be the sum of the intensity from the individual slits.

Wave interpretation: If light exists as waves, the light waves will have interference under the principle of superposition, creating bands of light and dark.
When the experiment was conducted, the light waves did indeed show these interference patterns. A third image that you can view is a graph of the intensity in terms of position, which matches with the predictions from interference.

OBJECT OF INTEREST

People say that Thomas Young was the last person who to know everything. I know that Thomas Young didn’t contribute that much compared to other scientist but I believe that Thomas Young’s contribution made a very impact. Maybe it didn’t make any impact to others but for me I believe that Thomas Young made a very good impact specially, with his contribution about the double-slit experiment. I choose Thomas Young as my scientist because I believe in his ability. I know that there are a lot of other scientist that contributed more but as simple as Young’s contribution that explain more about the light wave made me impress with his ability specially when most of the people say that “he was the last to know about everything”. I believe in him that much because I can see in his experiment we discovered the truth about light. About what is it made of, is it wave or particle.