Andrew Robinson

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.

"More than a century ago, in 1900, one of the great archaeological finds of all time was made in Crete. Arthur Evans discovered what he believed was the palace of King Minos, with its notorious labyrinth, home of the Minotaur. As a result, Evans was to become obsessed with one of the epic intellectual stories of the modern era: the search for the meaning of Linear B, the mysterious script found on clay tablets amid the ruined palace." "Evans died without achieving his objective and it was left to the enigmatic young man Michael Ventris to 'crack' the code in 1952. This is the first book to tell not just the story of Linear B but also that of the 'modest genius' who deciphered it. Based on hundreds of unpublished letters, interviews with survivors and other primary sources, Andrew Robinson's riveting account takes the reader through the life of this intriguing and contradictory man - a dazzling linguist but a divided soul. Stage by stage, we see how he finally achieved the breakthrough that revealed Linear B as the earliest comprehensible European writing system, more than half a millennium older than the Greek of Homer." "The man who solved what has been dubbed 'the Everest of Greek archaeology' was a complex and private figure, an amateur in classical scholarship (he trained as an architect). His tragic death in a car crash at the age of 34 only heightens the fascination of how his brilliant intuitions succeeded in resolving an ancient mystery where all the experts had failed."--BOOK JACKET.

Writing is perhaps humanity's greatest invention. Without it there would be no history and no civilization as we know it. The Story of Writing is the first book to demystify writing for the general reader. In a succinct and absorbing text, Andrew Robinson explains the interconnection between sound, symbol and script, and goes on to discuss each of the major writing systems in turn, from cuneiform and Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs to alphabets and the scripts of China and Japan today. He explores "proto-writing," including Ice Age symbols, tallies and Amerindian pictograms, and surveys the astonishing multiplicity of alphabets - not only Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Arabic and Indian scripts, but also the Cherokee "alphabet" and the writing of runes. Full coverage is given to the story of decipherment, and how the words of past ages have been brought back to life through the efforts of Champollion, Ventris and others. And in a provocative chapter devoted to as yet undeciphered scripts, Andrew Robinson challenges the reader: can the code of the Indus script, Cretan Linear A, the Phaistos Disc or Easter Island ever be broken? Armchair decipherers who read this book will be well placed to make discoveries that herald the next breakthrough.

"Starting with the origins of writing five thousand years ago, with cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Andrew Robinson explains how these early forms of writing developed into hundreds of scripts including the Roman alphabet and the Chinese characters. He reveals how the modern writing system we take for granted - including airport signage and electronic text messaging - resemble ancient scripts much more closely than we think."--Jacket.

An intriguing and illuminating read for science buffs, those fascinated by the lives and minds of great men and women, and anyone curious about how we came to understand the physical world. Copernicus, Crick, Watson, Galileo, Marie Curie: these are some of the forty pioneers behind modern science whose stories are explored here. The scientists come from around the globe and represent multiple nationalities American, English, German, French, Dutch, Czech, Indian, Japanese, and more. Often unorthodox thinkers, they frequently had to struggle against hostile contemporaries to gain recognition for their ideas and discoveries. All the major scientific disciplines are covered, including astronomy, biology, biochemistry, chemistry, computing, ecology, geology, medicine, neurology, physics, and psychology, as well as mathematics.

An overview of India emphasizing its cultural aspects.