Polymaths

"I have... attempted to throw some new light on the general properties of matter in other forms: and on the doctrine of heat, which is materially concerned in them; and to deduce some useful conclusions from a comparison of various experiments on the elasticity of , on evaporation, and on the indications of s."

"As early as 1793, when he was only twenty, Young had begun to communicate papers to the of London, which were adjudged worthy to be printed in full in the Philosophical Transactions; so it is not strange that he should have been asked to deliver the before that learned body the very first year after he came to London. The lecture was delivered November 12, 1801. Its subject was "The Theory of Light and Colors," and its reading marks an epoch in physical science; for here for the first time was brought forward convincing proof of that undulatory theory of light... which holds that light is not a corporeal entity, but a mere pulsation in the substance of an all-pervading ether, just as sound is a pulsation in the air, or in liquids or solids. Young had... advocated this theory at an earlier date, but it was not until 1801 that he hit upon the idea which enabled him to bring it to anything approaching a demonstration. It was while pondering over the familiar but puzzling phenomena of colored rings into which white light is broken when reflected from thin films—...—that an explanation occurred to him which at once put the entire undulatory theory on a new footing. With that sagacity of insight which we call genius, he saw of a sudden that the phenomena could be explained by supposing that when rays of light fall on a thin glass part of the rays being reflected from the upper surface other rays reflected from the lower surface might be so retarded in their course through the glass that the two sets would interfere... By following up this clew with mathematical precision, measuring the exact thickness of the plate and the space between the different rings of color, Young was able to show mathematically what must be the length of pulsation for each of the different colors of the spectrum. He estimated that the undulations of red light... must number about 37,640 to the inch, and pass any given spot at a rate of 463 millions of millions of undulations in a second, while the extreme violet numbers 59,750 undulations to the inch or 735 millions of millions to the second."

"There were giants abroad in the world of science in the early days of our century, Herschel, Lagrange, and Laplace; Cuvier, Brongniart, and Lamarck; Humboldt, Goethe, Priestley—what need to extend the list?—the names crowd upon us. But among them all there was no taller intellectual figure than that of a young Quaker who came to settle in London and practise the profession of medicine in the year 1801. The name of this young aspirant to medical honors and emoluments was Thomas Young. He came fresh from professional studies at Edinburgh and on the Continent, and he had the theory of medicine at his tongue's end; yet his medical knowledge, compared with the mental treasures of his capacious intellect as a whole, was but as a drop of water in the ocean. Incidentally the young physician was prevailed upon to occupy... the chair of Natural Philosophy at the , which Count Rumford had founded, and of which Davy was then Professor of Chemistry—the institution whose glories have been perpetuated by such names as Faraday and Tyndall, and which the Briton of to-day speaks of as the "Pantheon of Science.""

"The next publication by Young on his theory of color... a paper read by him before the , on July 1, 1802... "An account of some cases of the production of colours, not hitherto described." ... Young changed his three elementary color-sensations from red, yellow, and blue, to red, green, and violet, in consequence of Dr. Wollaston's correction of the description of the prismatic spectrum." ... Wollaston... only observed imperfectly the dark lines of the spectrum, now known as Fraunhofer's lines, but he imagined he saw a spectrum... divided into four distinct and separated "primary divisions." He at once inferred and erroneously that Newton's analysis... was false; that no orange or yellow exists... but between the red and the blue there exists only a "yellowish green." ...Young made a similar but even greater error in his description... I imagine that when Wollaston's sharp eye caught the glimpse of the divided spectrum he naturally thought... that the dark lines were the dividing lines of the pure simple colors of the solar spectrum. ... Young in finally selecting red, green and violet as the three elementary color-sensations was not, as Helmholtz states, guided in their choice "by the consideration that the extreme colors of the spectrum occupied the privileged positions," but selected those colors on hearing of Wollaston's supposed complete analysis of the sun's light into red, greenish blue and violet colors, separated from each other in the spectrum by dark spaces."

"Dr. Young, by his own confession, and for reasons... alluded to, was not adapted for a popular lecturer. His style was too compressed and laconic, and he had not sufficient knowledge of the intellectual habits of other men, to address himself prominently to those points of a subject where their difficulties were likely to occur. If... delivered nearly in the form in which they are printed, [the lectures] must have been generally unintelligible even to well-prepared persons, notwithstanding all the assistance which models, drawings, and diagrams could afford."

"It was the kindred science of sound which had suggested to Young his principle of interference, and he was under a similar obligation to the same science for the suggestion of the principle which formed the first step in the solution of the great problem of double refraction."

"We propose... to call the attention of our readers to some of the more remarkable Memoirs, or Philosophical Essays, of Dr. Young, which have not elsewhere been noticed; selecting those which are distinguished... or which are otherwise calculated to show the extraordinary capacity which he possessed of solving the most difficult problems in the applications of mathematics to natural philosophy, by processes apparently the most inadequate to the purpose. He never confined himself to the beaten track of a systematic investigation. We find in his writings no symmetrical formula or analytical refinements. There is no seeking after generalities, when the particular question which he has in hand does not require them; whilst every expedient is freely resorted to, however irregular and unusual, if it serves the purpose which he has in view. Important and difficult steps are passed over as manifest, terms are neglected as insignificant, analogies take the place of proofs, and we are surprised to find ourselves at the end of an investigation, even within the limits of space which would commonly be deemed hardly sufficient to master the difficulties which meet us at the beginning. But his rare sagacity hardly ever deserts him; and though he has occasionally been led to hasty and premature conclusions, or committed mistakes in numerical calculations, from the brevity and rapidity of his processes, yet nothing can be more surprising than the general soundness of his views of mechanical principles and their applications, and the correctness both of his philosophical and numerical results."

"Whether we regard the depth of Dr. Young's learning, the extent of his research, the accuracy of his statements, or the beauty and originality of his theoretical views, in whatever way we contemplate these Lectures, our admiration is equally excited. They embody a complete system of Mechanical Philosophy drawn from original sources, and illustrated by a hand capable of reducing them to the most perfect subjection. Unlike other popular writers, who... either take the sciences at second hand, or content themselves simply with... adopting the hypotheses of more distinguished philosophers, Dr. Young travelled over the whole literature of science, and whilst we are astonished at the rich store of materials which he has collected, we find nothing more prominent than the impress of his own acute and powerful mind."

"The first publication by Young of his theory of color appeared in a entitled, "On the Theory of Light and Colors," which Young read before the Royal Society on Nov. 12 1801. ... The fact that Young, the founder of the undulatory theory of light, in this Bakerian Lecture, in which it has been said that he laid the foundations of that doctrine, should set forth his views in a series of postulates followed by citations from the writings of Newton, to give them weight and proof, may justly surprise those who have trusted to the second-hand information derived from carelessly-complied text books and from hastily prepared popular lectures. But then, where would be the pugilistic charm of the popular lecturer on the undulatory theory of light, if Newton, his champion, the violent defender of the emanation cause, should decline to enter as a contestant? ... Young's hypothesis imagines each sensitive point of the retina to contain particles capable of vibrating in perfect unison to those vibrations causing three principal colors (red, yellow, and blue, in this the first publication of his hypothesis) "and that each of the particles is capable of being put in motion, less or more forcibly, by undulations differing less or more from a perfect unison." This would suppose such a triple molecular constitution of each nerve fibril as to cause the three species of its constituent molecules (or the atoms forming the molecules) to be in tune with the three rates of vibration corresponding respectively to the undulations of the ether causing red, yellow, and blue. He afterward says: "and each sensitive filament of the nerve may consist of three portions, one for each principal color." We have here a conception of the mode of action of an ætherial vibration on the retinal nerve fibrils which has not been described by those who have given accounts of Young's theory of color. ...the statements made by Young in the foregoing paper concerning his color hypothesis were entirely hypothetical not having been based on any observation or experiment either of his own or of others..."

"The final result will be that the American people will ultimately prefer communities. They will cop out or opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into this bureaucratic structure and say it is a great life--although I would assume that many on their death beds must feel otherwise. The process of copping out will take a long time, but notice: we are already copping out of military service on a wholesale basis; we are already copping out of voting on a large scale basis. ...People are also copping out by refusing to pay any attention to newspapers or to what’s going on in the world, and by increasing emphasis on the growth of localism, what is happening in their own neighborhoods."

"...another cause of today’s instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking, and the corporation. These are free of political controls and social responsibility and have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital."

"When Rome fell, the Christian answer was, "Create our own communities.""

"We have now done what the Romans did when they started to commit suicide. We have shifted from an army of citizens to an army of mercenaries..."

"The brainwashing which has been going on for 150 years has also resulted in the replacement of intellectual activities and religion by ideologies and science. ...I have nothing against Marx, except that his theories do not explain what happened."

"The appearance of stability from 1840 to about 1900 was superficial, temporary and destructive in the long run... because communities and societies must rest upon cooperation and not upon competition. Anyone who says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying to maximize his own greed is talking total nonsense. And to teach it in schools, and to go on television and call it the American way of life still doesn't make it true. Competition and envy cannot become the basis of any society or any community."

"Another aspect of the nineteenth century propaganda system is the increasing emphasis upon material desires."

"...in our society... this has now become a propagandist system in which emphasis is put on the future... the ideology against which the young people of the 1950's and 1960's rebelled. Future preference: plan; study hard; save."

"...we were brainwashed into believing... that the only important thing was individualism. They called it freedom. There is no such thing as freedom. There is something called liberty; it's quite different. ...read [Guido de] Ruggiero's History of European Liberalism... Freedom is freedom from restraints. We're always under restraints."

"...the nineteenth century Age of Expansion... brought on an acceleration of the main focus of the activities of society... from the areas of internal controls to the areas of external controls. ...the increasing role of propaganda... helped create an impression of stability."

"...1776 is a very significant year. and this is not just because the American Revolution began. Watt's patent of the steam engine... Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations... the failure of the French to reorganize their political system occurred in 1776, and so forth. ...The destruction of communities, the destruction of religion and the frustration of emotions were greatly intensified by the Industrial Revolution: railroads, factories, growth of cities, technological revolution in the countryside and in the growing of food and so forth."

"...they have brainwashed us into believing in the last 150 years... that quantitative change is superior to qualitative attributes. If we can turn out more... it doesn't matter if they're half as good. ...We're quantifying everything, and that is why we're trying to put everything on computers. Governments will no longer have to make decisions; computers will do it."

"...they give us vicarious satisfactions for many of our frustrations. ...People need exercise; they do not need to watch other people exercise... Another vicarious satisfaction is sexy magazines; this is vicarious sex. To anyone rushing to buy one, I'd like to say, "The real thing is better.""

"The very idea that there is some kind of conflict between science and religion is completely mistaken. Science is a method for investigating experience... Religion is the fundamental, necessary internalization of our system of more permanent values."

"Another thing that they have tried to get us to believe in the last 150 years... is that the nation as the repository of sovereignty can be both a state and a community. ...Why did the English, the French, the Castilians, the Hohenzollerns, and others become the repository of sovereignty as nations... They did so because... weapons made it possible to compel obedience over areas which were approximately the size of these national groups... nationalism is an episode in history, and it fit a certain power structure and a certain configuration in human life in our civilization. Now... They all want autonomy. ...The nation or the state, as we now have it as the structure of power, cannot be a community."

"...I offended some of you by saying you had been brainwashed. This is not an insult; it's a simple statement of fact. When any infant is born and socialized in a society, even if he is to become a very mature individual, he has been brainwashed. ...given a structure for categorizing his experience and a system of values applied to the structure of categories."

"The difference between a stable society and an unstable one is that the restraints in an unstable one are external. In a stable society government ultimately becomes unnecessary; the restraints on people's actions are internal, they're self-disciplined..."

"The economic and technological achievements of industrialization in this period were fundamentally mistaken. ...based upon plundering the natural capital of the globe that was created over millions of years: the plundering of the soils and their fertility; the plundering of human communities whether they were our own or someone else's."

"[Increasing] politicization means the [economic] expansion is slowing up and you are no longer attempting to achieve increased output per capita, or increased wealth, or increased satisfactions... but you are doing so by mobilizing power. We have seen this going on for almost a century. ...increased militarization."

"...today everything is commercialized--politics, religion, education, ideology, belief, the armed services. ...Everything has its price."

"...increasing remoteness of desires from needs. ...increasing confusion between means and ends. The ends are human needs... Instead they want the means they have been brainwashed to accept... Never was any society in human history as rich and as powerful as Western Civilization and the United States, and it is not a happy society."

"...in the last thousand years. If we go back before [AD] 976... the main core of people's life and experience... was in the religious, emotional and social levels. They had religious beliefs, they had social and emotional relationships with people they saw every day. ...controls and rewards were internalized. ...This is why they could get along without a state in 976: all the significant controls were internalized."

"...when a society is reaching its end, in the last couple of centuries you have... a misplacement of satisfactions. You find your emotional satisfaction in making a lot of money... or in proving to the poor, half-naked people in Southeast Asia that you can kill them in large numbers."

"...Western Civilization began to expand in 976. ...The economic expansion was achieved chiefly by specialization and exchange... commercialization."

"...controls on behavior shift from the intermediate levels of human experience (social, emotional and religious) to the lower (military and political) or to the upper (ideological). They become the externalized controls of a mature society: weapons, bureaucracies, material rewards, or ideology."

"Without communities, no infant will be sufficiently socialized... and that occurs in the first four or five years of life. ...The first two years are important. ...of vital importance. He has to be loved, above all he has to be talked to."

"A community is made up of intimate relationships among diversified types of individuals--a kinship group, a local group, a neighborhood, a village, a large family."

"A state of individuals, such as we now have reached in Western Civilization, will not create persons, and the atomized individuals who make it up will be motivated by desires that do not necessarily reflect needs. Instead of needing other people they need a shot of heroin; instead of some kind of religious conviction, they have to be with the winning team."

"When you destroy people's religious expression, they will establish secularized religions like Marxism."

"...human beings have religious needs. They have a need for a feeling of certitude in their minds about things they cannot control and they do not fully understand, and with humility, they admit they do not understand..."

"Persons, personalities if you wish, can only be made in communities."

"...we no longer have intellectually satisfying arrangements in our educational system, in our arts, humanities or anything else; instead we have slogans and ideologies. An ideology is a religious or emotional expression; it is not an intellectual expression."

"In its final stages the civilization becomes a dualism of almost totalitarian imperial power and an amorphous mass culture of atomized individuals."

"The fundamental, all-pervasive cause of world instability is the destruction of communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the resulting neuroses and psychoses. The technological acceleration of transportation, communication and weapons systems is now creating power areas wider than existing political structures."

"...a state is not the same thing as a society, although the Greeks and Romans thought it was. A state is an organization of power on a territorial basis."

"The problem of meaning today is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory experiences of men can be put into a consistent picture that will provide contemporary man with a convincing basis from which to live and to act."

"The link between a society, whether it be made up of communities or individuals, and a state is this: Power rests on the ability to satisfy human needs."

"For years I have told my students that I been trying to train executives rather than clerks. The distinction between the two is parallel to the distinction previously made between understanding and knowledge. It is a mighty low executive who cannot hire several people with command of more knowledge than he has himself."

"To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective."

"The West believes that man and the universe are both complex and that the apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a reasonably workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and experimentation."

"...the levels of culture, the aspects of society: military, political, economic, social, emotional, religious, and intellectual. Those are your basic human needs. ...they are arranged in evolutionary sequence."