April 26, 2005

om•nis•cience - adj.
Having total knowledge; knowing everything.

Omniscience is one of my favorite vocabulary words from freshman bonehead English class. Unfortunately, this word has little practical use nowadays and most current references involve deities of some sort. However I ran across something interesting as I was researching some scholars of the early 19th century.

Thomas Young (Born 1773, Died 1829) was an imminent English scientist and researcher. By the time he was fourteen years old, he spoke 12 languages and the career that followed held no less distinction. One must remember that at this time, a science didn’t have the specialties it does today. A scientist could be just that – and research a variety of subjects. Young made breakthrough discoveries in a variety of areas, most especially in the physics of optics (he discovered that light was composed of waves) and hieroglyphics (before his death, he had completely translated the demotic text of the Rosetta Stone and had made significant progress towards the understanding of the hieroglyphic alphabet).

What’s really fascinating though, is that Young (along with others such as Gottfried Leibniz and Francis Bacon) is considered, by many, to be “The Last Person to Know Everything”. Think about it. Only two hundred years ago, it was conceivable that one could have been familiar with virtually all Western academic knowledge of the time. Perhaps before the Industrial Revolution, the word omniscience was a much more realistic adjective for a living, breathing human being, than it could be now.

We now recognize many forms of knowledge from all around the world. If one could possibly (and unverifiably) know all there is to know about Western academic knowledge at that time, we must go back further if we were to be able to find someone who might be familiar with all academic knowledge of the world. Ironically, if we go back farther to a time when it might have been possible, the world had not yet been navigated and therefore impossible to have gained such knowledge.

Thus it is unlikely that anyone will ever again be bestowed such a title as “The Last Person to Know Everything”.