Young was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. He attended Lincoln High School and graduated in 1941. Young studied physics at Howard University. He was appointed as a physics instructor at the Hampton Institute, whilst simultaneously completing a master's degree in acoustical engineering at Howard University. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a research assistant in 1949 and earned a Doctorate in Science in 1953. His early research considered the propagation of noise in pipes. He was a member of Sigma Pi Sigma, Sigma Xi and Beta Kappa Chi. After earning his PhD, Young joined Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he began working on particle physics. He investigated pions and deuteron stripping theory.