Physics textbooks identify Thomas Young (1773-1829) as the experimenter who first proved that light is a wave. Young's character has a quality all but lost in our narcissistic culture. This 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.

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.