The Last Man Who Knew Everything
No one has given the polymath Thomas Young (1773–1829) the all-round examination he so richly deserves—until now. Celebrated biographer Andrew Robinson portrays a man who solved mystery after mystery in the face of ridicule and rejection, and never sought fame. As a physicist, Young challenged the theories of Isaac Newton and proved that light is a wave. As a physician, he showed how the eye focuses and proposed the three-colour theory of vision, only confirmed a century and a half later. As an Egyptologist, he made crucial contributions to deciphering the Rosetta Stone. It is hard to grasp how much Young knew. This biography is the fascinating story of a driven yet modest hero who cared less about what others thought of him than for the joys of an unbridled pursuit of knowledge—with a new foreword by Martin Rees and a new postscript discussing polymathy in the two centuries since the time of Young. It returns this neglected genius to his proper position in the pantheon of great scientific thinkers.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
7mentions
6people
2011–2026years
29% recommend71% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Not really. There's an ultra-brief scene where it's mentioned, but that's it, IIRC.
The movie... is a bunch of anecdotes strung together to make a ham-handed point at the end. It was a decent movie if you treat it as a fictional story instead of an actual retelling.
I'd stick with the book. (And if you specifically care about Fermi, I recommend "The Last Man Who Knew Everything" by David Schwartz)
- For a fun read, check out: "The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, The Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius"
I think it's fun to play across disciplines :)
- > 4 months is barely enough time to adapt to a fundamentally new tool
Yes, but also the extra wrinkle that this whole thing is moving so fast that 4 months old is borderline obsolete. Same into the future, any study starting now based on the state of the art on 22/01/2026 will involve models and potentially workflows already obsolete by 22/05/2026.
We probably can't ever adapt fully when the entire landscape is changing like that.
> Previous tools outsourced partial processes - calculators do arithmetic, Google stores facts. LLMs can potentially take over the entire cognitive process from thinking to formulating. That's qualitatively different.
Yes, but also consider that this is true of any team: All managers hire people to outsource some entire cognitive process, letting themselves focus on their own personal comparative advantage.
The book "The Last Man Who Knew Everything" is about Thomas Young, who died in 1829; since then, the sum of recorded knowledge has broadened too much for any single person to learn it all, so we need specialists, including specialists in managing other specialists.
AI is a complement to our own minds with both sides of this: Unlike us, AI can "learn it all", just not very well compared to humans. If any of us had a sci-fi/fantasy time loop/pause that let us survive long enough to read the entire internet, we'd be much more competent than any of these models, but we don't, and the AI runs on hardware which allows it to.
For the moment, it's still useful to have management skills (and to know about and use Popperian falsification rather than verification) so that we can discover and compensate for the weaknesses of the AI.
- Yeah, I'm finishing up a compleat collection of J.R.R. Tolkien's writings, and am probably going to collect (and read/re-read) all of Isaac Asimov's non-fiction.
There are at least five books with the (partial) title _The Last Man Who Knew Everything_ about:
- Leibniz https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15770928-the-last-man-wh...
- Athanasius Kircher https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119131.Athanasius_Kirche...
- Thomas Young https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/763029.The_Last_Man_Who_...
- Joseph Leidy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119125.Joseph_Leidy
- Enrico Fermi https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34746094-the-last-man-wh...
Maybe instead I'll start with those biographies...
surprised Sir Francis Bacon wasn't described thus....
- There has never been a time when most technology in use was understood by the general population.
"The Last Man Who Knew Everything"[0] was 1773–1829 and the trend towards compulsory education was only beginning, 2 countries at the start of his life and 7 at the end[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Man_Who_Knew_Everythi...
- I recently read The Idea Factory [1] which covers Bell Labs in its heyday. Many of the most brilliant human beings of that era worked for very modest salaries, and seemed content to do so. I wonder why it is that nowadays the "smartest" people tend to work in tech or finance and mostly pursue wealth. A few possibilities:
1. The rate of meaningful new discoveries in basic research has slowed significantly compared to the mid 1900s. Most important advances now involve enormous groups of researchers, and require decades of work. So the basic research route is less appealing overall.
2. Technology and finance provide clear avenues for outsized financial returns that simply weren't available in the past. Enrico Fermi, for example, was fairly enterprising. He wasn't an academic ascetic at least, and made some effort to amass wealth. But the best strategies he came up with were publishing textbooks and maybe some dabbling in the stock market (That is if I remember my details from The Last Man Who Knew Everything [2] correctly)
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factor...
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34746094-the-last-man-wh...
Related
The Last Question
94 recommend · 194
A short history of nearly everything
102 recommend · 138
2008–2026
The Last Answer
13 recommend · 21
Last and First Men
24 recommend · 52
The Man Who Knew Infinity
22 recommend · 31
The Last Man
2 recommend · 3
Alan Turing
17 recommend · 27
