The Natural Philosopher Trivia Quiz

Answer: Modulus

Young's Modulus is a constant in the mathematical equation describing elasticity - it is sometimes called the modulus of elasticity. He called it the 'specific modulus'.

Answer: Investigation into the nature of light.

It provided the basic element in the development of the wave theory and was first performed in 1801. Young identified the phenomenon called interference. In the experiment light from a single source is split into two beams and then recombined giving a pattern of light and dark fringes, Young concluded that the fringes result from the fact that when the beams recombine their peaks and troughs may not be in step. When peaks coincide they reinforce each other, and a line of light results; when a peak and a trough coincide they cancel each other, and a dark line results.

Newton had said light consisted of particles and at that time in England challenging anything Newton said was almost like challenging the bible so Young received a lot of opposition. In 1817 he proposed that light waves were at right angles to the direction of travel rather than in the direction of travel, which explains polarization.

Answer: Energy

In the sense Young used it energy is the capacity for doing work and in the scientific sense no work is done unless something moves.
Young had other firsts such as his work on terrestrial radiant heat and estimating the size of a molecule (although he was out by about 100 times and Laplace also estimated it independently).

Answer: False

He practiced during the 'season' (when fashionable people lived outside of London) in Worthing and was also a physician at St George's hospital.
It seems he suffered from a poor bedside manner. Also his favourite maxim was that a 'medical diagnosis is only a balance of probabilities' but patients prefer certainty. Just before he retired from practice in 1820 he wrote 'I have been here (Worthing) for six or seven days only - and find it quite a consolation to be without a single patient except paupers'. He did have a private income and other non-medical jobs.

Answer: False

The first Young knew of Champollion was in 1814. Soon after that Champollion wrote to Young (in his capacity as foreign Secretary of the Royal Society) to get a cast of the Rosetta stone as the two versions he had differed. At this time Young was ahead of Champollion - in 1815 Champollion wrote that 'the whole advantage will certainly be on my side'. In 1821 Champollion published his first work and incorrectly claimed Young was wrong and 'hieratic (sic) characters are signs of things and not of sounds'. In 1822 before Champollion published his famous 'Lettre a M. Dacier' Young and his wife visited Paris and met him on more than one occasion.
Hieroglyphs were Champollion's life work but only one of Young's many interests and by 1823 he was losing interest.
In 1827 Young was awarded a seat as a foreign associate of the French Academy of Sciences. When he took his seat in 1828 he met Champollion and wrote a letter speaking very highly of him and his work.

Answer: False

They were one of Young's few failures. The papyri were found in 1753 and first thought to be logs of wood. In 1793 only one easy papyrus of little interest had been unrolled. Between 1802 and 1806 about 200 of the easiest had been dealt with. A group of people including Young and Sir Humphry Davy tried. Davy had some success with 23 but said only 120 more of about 1400 were worth attempting.

Answer: All of these subjects

It was a course of 60 lectures and was later published in book form. In 1934 it was described by Sir Joseph Larmor, a prominent physicist as the 'Greatest and most original of all lecture courses'.

Answer: Inspector of Calculations and Physician at the 'Paladium Insurance Company'

The Paladium went through a series of mergers and is now part of one of the major British life assurance companies. He took a cut in pay from £500 to £400 as the work took up less time than he had anticipated.
In 1814 he was on a committee investigating the hazards of the introduction of gas light in London.

Answer: False

Enchorial is what he called the script we know call demotic. Yong was mostly interested in demotic - he thought hieroglyphs would be mostly concerned with the Egyptians 'Ridiculous rites and ceremonies'.
The device he invented was the eriometer, which can also be used for measuring the sizes of things such as blood corpuscles or the average size of the small particles that cause a halo around the Moon.

Answer: Six

The only name on the Rosetta stone is Ptolemy - written as PTOLMIS or PTULMIS. He deduced the name in another inscription with what he correctly believed to be the female indicator was Ptolemy's queen Berenike - written as BRNKIS. He later identified other signs.
Incidentally the main problem with deciphering ancient Egyptian using the Rosetta stone is that the three sections are not direct translations of each other.