Abstract
Thomas Young (1773–1829) made contributions to many fields, but is perhaps best remembered for his trichromatic theory of color vision that was expanded upon by Hermann von Helmholtz and James Clerk Maxwell decades after his death and confirmed by modern neurophysiologists. He also correctly concluded that, under certain circumstances, light behaves as a wave and made observations on accommodation and astigmatic refractive error that were in advance of his time. He received only a small portion of the credit due to him during his lifetime because of his lack of focus and his limited ability to communicate his ideas clearly to others.
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References
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Gittinger, J.W. (2017). Thomas Young: The Foundations of Light, Color, and Optics. In: Marmor, M., Albert, D. (eds) Foundations of Ophthalmology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59641-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59641-9_4
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