biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1773–1829)
|
| biography:
| Physicist, physician, and Egyptologist, born in Milverton, Somerset, SW England, UK. He studied medicine at London, Edinburgh, Göttingen, and Cambridge universities, then devoted himself to scientific research, becoming professor of natural philosophy to the Royal Institution (1801). His Lectures (1807) expounded the doctrine of interference, which established the wave theory of light. He proposed that the eye required only three basic colour receptors for full colour vision - red, green, and blue. He also did valuable work in insurance, haemodynamics, and Egyptology, and made a fundamental contribution to the deciphering of the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. |
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