My new baby cousin Easton Azar. My famous skater cousin Shane Azar’s new baby boy. Born 31st may 2012

Poor Sam

Flying over the snow in Victoria, going to be or hell of a season this winter

Melbourne bound today I see my boyfriend

This is Shady Wednesday my cousins dog. She is to perfect!

Getting a picture text off my best friend Abby. She makes everything better in my world, she makes my life worth all the bullshit

At jakes gig hunt the haunted god they blew the house down - Sydney 2012

My girls and I before kings cross

I’m proud to have these beautiful girls in my life

Young belonged to a Quaker family of Milverton, Somerset, where he was born in 1773, the eldest of ten children. At the age of fourteen Young had learned Greek and Latin and was acquainted with French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Amharic.

Young began to study medicine in London in 1792, moved to Edinburgh in 1794, and a year later went to Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany where he obtained the degree of doctor of physics in 1796. In 1797 he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge.In the same year he inherited the estate of his granduncle, Richard Brocklesby, which made him financially independent, and in 1799 he established himself as a physician at 48 Welbeck Street, London (now recorded with a blue plaque). Young published many of his first academic articles anonymously to protect his reputation as a physician.

In 1801 Young was appointed professor of natural philosophy (mainly physics) at the Royal Institution. In two years he delivered 91 lectures. In 1802, he was appointed foreign secretary of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow in 1794. He resigned his professorship in 1803, fearing that its duties would interfere with his medical practice. His lectures were published in 1807 in the Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and contain a number of anticipations of later theories.

In 1811 Young became physician to St. George’s Hospital, and in 1814 he served on a committee appointed to consider the dangers involved in the general introduction of gas into London. In 1816 he was secretary of a commission charged with ascertaining the precise length of the second’s or seconds pendulum (the length of a pendulum whose period is exactly 2 seconds), and in 1818 he became secretary to the Board of Longitude and superintendent of the HM Nautical Almanac Office.

A few years before his death he became interested in life insurance,and in 1827 he was chosen one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences. In 1828, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

In Young’s own judgment, of his many achievements the most important was to establish the wave theory of light. To do so, he had to overcome the century-old view, expressed in the venerable Isaac Newton’s “Optics”, that light is a particle. Nevertheless, in the early 19th century Young put forth a number of theoretical reasons supporting the wave theory of light, and he developed two enduring demonstrations to support this viewpoint. With the ripple tank he demonstrated the idea of interference in the context of water waves. With the Young’s interference experiment, or double-slit experiment, he demonstrated interference in the context of light as a wave.

“The experiments I am about to relate … may be repeated with great ease, whenever the sun shines, and without any other apparatus than is at hand to every one.”

This is how Thomas Young speaking on November 24, 1803, to the Royal Society of London, began his description of the historic experiment. His talk was published in the following year’s Philosophical Transactions, and was destined to become a classic, still reprinted and read today.

In the subsequent paper entitled Experiments and Calculations Relative to Physical Optics, published in 1804, Young describes an experiment in which he placed a narrow card (approx. 1/30th in.) in a beam of light from a single opening in a window and observed the fringes of color in the shadow and to the sides of the card. He observed that placing another card before or after the narrow strip so as to prevent light from the beam from striking one of its edges caused the fringes to disappear. This supported the contention that light is composed of waves. Young performed and analyzed a number of experiments, including interference of light from reflection off nearby pairs of micrometer grooves, from reflection off thin films of soap and oil, and from Newton’s rings. He also performed two important diffraction experiments using fibers and long narrow strips. In his Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807) he gives Grimaldi credit for first observing the fringes in the shadow of an object placed in a beam of light. Within ten years, much of Young’s work was reproduced and then extended by Fresnel. (Tony Rothman in Everything’s Relative and Other Fables from Science and Technology argues that there is no clear evidence that Young actually did the two-slit experiment)