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Among the most eminent physicists of his time was Thomas Young, who was born at Milverton on June 13, 1773, and died in London on May 10, 1829. He seems as a boy to have been somewhat of a prodigy, being well read in modern languages and literature, as well as in science; he always kept up his literary tastes, and it was he who in 1819 first suggested the key to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which J. F. Champollion used so successfully. Young was destined to be a doctor, and after attending lectures at Edinburgh and Gê¶ttingen entered at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, from which he took his degree in 1799; and to his stay at the University he attributed much of his future distinction. His medical career was not particularly successful, and his favourite maxim that a medical diagnosis is only a balance of probabilities was not appreciated by his patients, who looked for certainty in return for their fee. Fortunately his private means were ample. Several papers contributed to various learned societies from 1798 onwards prove him to have been a mathematician of considerable power; but the researches which have immortalised his name are those by which he laid down the laws of interference of waves and of light, and was thus able to suggest the means by which the chief difficulties then felt in the way of the undulatory theory of light could be overcome.
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