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Degrees Kelvin 1st (first) Edition by David Lindley [2004]
Lord Kelvin. In 1840 a precocious 16 year old by the name of William Thomson spent his summer vacation studying an extraordinarily sophisticated mathematical controversy. His brilliant analysis inspired lavish praise and made the boy an instant intellectual celebrity. As a scholar William dazzled a Victorian society enthralled with the seductive authority and powerful beauty of scientific discovery. At a time when no one really understood heat, light, electricity, or magnetism, Thomson found key connections between them, laying the groundwork for two of the cornerstones of 19th-century science - the theories of electromagnetism and thermodynamics. Gaining fame and wealth through his inventive genius, Thomson was elevated to the peerage by Queen Victoria for his many achievements. He was first scientist ever to be so honored. Indeed, his name survives in the designation of degrees Kelvin, the temperature scale that begins at absolute zero, the point at which atomic motion ceases and there is a complete absence of heat. Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was Great Britain's unrivaled scientific hero. But as the century drew to a close and Queen Victoria's reign ended, this legendary scientific mind began to weaken. He grudgingly gave way to others with a keener, more modern vision. But the great physicist did not go quietly. With a ready pulpit at his disposal, he publicly proclaimed his doubts over the existence of atoms. He refused to believe that radioactivity involved the transmutation of elements. And believing that the origin of life was a matter beyond the expertise of science and better left to theologians, he vehemently opposed the doctrines of evolution, repeatedlyrailing against Charles Darwin. Sadly, this pioneer of modern science spent his waning years arguing that the Earth and the Sun could not be more than 100 million years old. And although his early mathematical prowess had transformed our understanding of the forces of nature, he would n
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First published January 1, 2004
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About the author
David Lindley
48 books40 followersDavid Lindley is a theoretical physicist and author. He holds a B.A. in theoretical physics from Cambridge University and a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Sussex. Then he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge University.
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August 3, 2016
William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was one of the great scientists of the 19th century. In his own time, he was at the pinnacle of scientific prestige. He was the first scientist ever ennobled in the United Kington. His reputation, however, has fallen off considerably since his own time, and he mostly appears in the history of science as a cranky old man, opposing these new-fangled things like nuclear physics and relativity.
This biography paints a picture of the man, with particular emphasis on trying to understand the shifts in his reputation. I liked the book quite a bit, and I liked the new perspective it gave me on 19th century science. The book paints a generally sympathetic portrait of Thomson. The overall view it gave me is that he was a tremendously talented scientist, who did a very great deal of good, but whose reputation has suffered for three reasons: (1) he was an un-systematic thinker, poor at tracing which ideas he got from where; as a result, it's hard to give him credit for any large coherent breakthrough. (2) He devoted much of his energies to applied science, which gets less credit and memory than fundamental breakthroughs (3)
Kelvin is remembered today primarily for his work on thermodynamics. It was in honor this work that he had the SI unit of temperature named after him. As this biography discussed in detail, his legacy here is mixed. He was one of the first people in Europe to understand the importance of Carnot's work, to formulate a concept of entropy, and to discover the existence of an absolute thermodynamic zero point. However, it is not entirely clear which ideas were originally his and which he had adopted from others. Kelvin was a great borrower and sharer of ideas, without regard to original invention. Moreover, he had the bad habit, when he changed his mind, of denying that he had done so and claiming that he had that thought in mind all along.
Kelvin was fair-minded and generous enough to never object when others took credit for his ideas. For instance, he was the person who had suggested to George Stokes the theorem that now has Stokes' name.
Something that this biography emphasizes, which I had never heard before, is that Kelvin was one of the inventors of "applied physics." He was one of the first physicists to really push home the claim that the laws of classical physics can be used to resolve messy engineering questions. He devoted a great deal of time and energy to problems like engineering underwater telegraph cables, understanding the stability of ships, understanding and correcting for the deflection of magnetic compasses, and so forth. He thought of this applied work as having equal importance as theoretical inquiries. This was work of immense social value; he probably saved hundreds of lives with his compass work. Moreover, the project of tying together physics and engineering has been tremendously fruitful in engineering, mathematics and physics. And Kelvin deserves a great deal of the credit for pioneering this sort of inquiry.
Kelvin lived a very long time, and was engaged in a wide range of scientific topics. As a result, he was wrong about several major topics, notably aether and the age of the earth. Our current theories on these topics are some the most-celebrated achievements of the early 20th century, and so Kelvin necessarily enters the story as the mistaken representative of the old guard. He was in the old guard and he was wrong. But he was wrong for perfectly good reasons. It was a real advance to compute a bound on the age of the earth, based on its stored internal heat, and then to show that this was a problem for contemporary geography. Showing that disparate theories are incompatible is one of the ways science advances. Similarly with aether. Thomson spent decades trying to construct a mechanical theory of electromagnetism based on vibrations of an aether. This didn't work, and couldn't have worked, but the only way science advances is when lines of inquiry and possible theories are tested and tried out. Somebody had to give aether a fair go before scientists were justified in rejecting in, and it's Thomson's bad luck that he wound up taking the hit for that.
This biography paints a picture of the man, with particular emphasis on trying to understand the shifts in his reputation. I liked the book quite a bit, and I liked the new perspective it gave me on 19th century science. The book paints a generally sympathetic portrait of Thomson. The overall view it gave me is that he was a tremendously talented scientist, who did a very great deal of good, but whose reputation has suffered for three reasons: (1) he was an un-systematic thinker, poor at tracing which ideas he got from where; as a result, it's hard to give him credit for any large coherent breakthrough. (2) He devoted much of his energies to applied science, which gets less credit and memory than fundamental breakthroughs (3)
Kelvin is remembered today primarily for his work on thermodynamics. It was in honor this work that he had the SI unit of temperature named after him. As this biography discussed in detail, his legacy here is mixed. He was one of the first people in Europe to understand the importance of Carnot's work, to formulate a concept of entropy, and to discover the existence of an absolute thermodynamic zero point. However, it is not entirely clear which ideas were originally his and which he had adopted from others. Kelvin was a great borrower and sharer of ideas, without regard to original invention. Moreover, he had the bad habit, when he changed his mind, of denying that he had done so and claiming that he had that thought in mind all along.
Kelvin was fair-minded and generous enough to never object when others took credit for his ideas. For instance, he was the person who had suggested to George Stokes the theorem that now has Stokes' name.
Something that this biography emphasizes, which I had never heard before, is that Kelvin was one of the inventors of "applied physics." He was one of the first physicists to really push home the claim that the laws of classical physics can be used to resolve messy engineering questions. He devoted a great deal of time and energy to problems like engineering underwater telegraph cables, understanding the stability of ships, understanding and correcting for the deflection of magnetic compasses, and so forth. He thought of this applied work as having equal importance as theoretical inquiries. This was work of immense social value; he probably saved hundreds of lives with his compass work. Moreover, the project of tying together physics and engineering has been tremendously fruitful in engineering, mathematics and physics. And Kelvin deserves a great deal of the credit for pioneering this sort of inquiry.
Kelvin lived a very long time, and was engaged in a wide range of scientific topics. As a result, he was wrong about several major topics, notably aether and the age of the earth. Our current theories on these topics are some the most-celebrated achievements of the early 20th century, and so Kelvin necessarily enters the story as the mistaken representative of the old guard. He was in the old guard and he was wrong. But he was wrong for perfectly good reasons. It was a real advance to compute a bound on the age of the earth, based on its stored internal heat, and then to show that this was a problem for contemporary geography. Showing that disparate theories are incompatible is one of the ways science advances. Similarly with aether. Thomson spent decades trying to construct a mechanical theory of electromagnetism based on vibrations of an aether. This didn't work, and couldn't have worked, but the only way science advances is when lines of inquiry and possible theories are tested and tried out. Somebody had to give aether a fair go before scientists were justified in rejecting in, and it's Thomson's bad luck that he wound up taking the hit for that.
May 9, 2025
I had not realised what an affect Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) had had on my world today as an electrical engineer. I had always associated him with work in graduating temperature (because of the units) erroneously as it turns out. I knew he was considered one of the greats (he was buried next to Newton after all), but I could not say why. Coincidentally, while I was reading Degrees Kelvin by David Lindley (published by Joseph Henry Press, 2004) his named popped up in the comments of one of Max Maxfield’s blogs .
Thomson was one of those guys that we love to hate: brilliant, good looking, gregarious, personable, and excelled at sports. He was born into an academic family and was destined for great things at an early age. He attended Cambridge University to much acclaim and academic success and then returned to take up an academic post in Glasgow in 1846. At that point very little was known of heat and energy, light, electricity and magnetism. In fact according to the book, physics as we know it (it was known as Natural Philosophy) was not codified until the 1860s by Thomson and Peter Tait in their multi-volume book that covered the discoveries and developments that had taken place in the two decades.
Apparently Thomson was much taken and completely absorbed Fourier’s analysis of heat flow. He then started creating the mathematics around the first law of thermodynamics and was right in the thick of things in propounding the law of conservation of energy. Much of the book is taken up with who was the first to come up with what concept, but there are many names that pop up in this field as it further moved to the second law of thermodynamics and conceptualising entropy. Carnot, Clausius, Stokes and Joule are all his contemporaries and were all in contact through journals and correspondence (actually Carnot was a little before). If that was all, it would have been enough to establish his name in the halls of fame. But wait, there’s more…
Michael Faraday had come up with the concept of magnetic fields, but he was unable to express it in scientific terms for two reasons. Firstly he did not have the mathematical skills and secondly he did not have the vocabulary to describe it. Actually, that’s not fair- nobody had the vocabulary. Reading some if the correspondence, even with the stilted Victorian prose, you can’t help but note how they were struggling to match phenomena with words. Terms like ether, flux and vortex are bandied around as they tried to firstly describe and then quantify their observations as they evolved. Faraday regarded Thomson as the only person who managed to understand his concepts and express them mathematically.
Thomson had an immensely practical side to him and managed to apply theory into practice, being one of the first to take scientific principles and translate them into practical applications. If you don’t think that sounds like engineering, consider this. He was involved in the establishment of the undersea cable from Europe to North America and the elsewhere right from the get-go including the problems of insulation and cable weight in addition to transmission issues. The Morse signals were impaired as a result of the resistance and leakage of the cables and Thomson developed a galvanometer that sensitive enough to enable the signals to be read reliably (Edison was trained on one). As a later development he tried and largely succeeded to get a pen output to provide a permanent record of the transmission. He came up with a technique of charging the ink to get it out the nozzle which is the same technique used in ink-jet printers today. Even if this was not enough to convince you of the nascence of engineering, Sir William learned about the patenting process and patented all his products establishing himself as an incredibly wealthy man. The wealth probably had more to do with his elevation to the aristocracy than his science.
At the time there was no method of measuring electric current. In fact they didn’t even know what to call it. There were arguments on how to measure resistance including concepts from Wheatstone and Siemens. Because of its derivation from the concept of work done developed by Joule, resistance was initially measured in kilometres per second! Thomson was deeply involved in the development of the standards and even developed the first calibrated galvanometer to aid in the measurement of resistance. The names of the electrical units approximating the ones we use today appear to have been apportioned by chauvinistic considerations at a meeting in 1881 that included luminaries like Helmholtz, a close friend of Thomson. People involved with electricity including Thomson were inevitably called “electricians” which morphed into “telegraph engineers” before becoming “electrical engineer” in the 1880s.
Despite all this, like all of us he also had some flaws. There were contradictions for a start. He loved the Scottish landscape, but had no qualms converting Niagara Falls in a giant power generation scheme so that no water flowed over the falls. He was a great friend of Westinghouse despite his (Thomson`s) preference of DC over AC . He refused to accept the Theory of Evolution because according to his calculations based on the loss of heat from the earth, the earth could be no more than 100 million years old. Notwithstanding this he chose to defer to a religious defence when discussing evolution. He could not accept Maxwell’s explanation of electromagnetic radiation because he could not understand how it could pass through a vacuum. He always wanted a mechanical model to explain the phenomenon despite the fact that Maxwell`s treatise seemed to match Faraday’s original concepts. Even after Heaviside transformed Maxwell’s equations into the elegant form that we use today, he could not accept it. He did not believe that an element could change into another element even with the evidence of radium. He was limited by the concepts of his time and background and at the end of his life his approach of mechanical modelling of everything no longer could explain the new science. This is a point also made by Bill Bryson in his “A Short History of Nearly Everything” about how Michael Faraday’s deep religious beliefs hampered his understanding of electro-magnetism.
Thomson’s brilliance was the ability to combine different peoples’ work and theories to create an explanation that everyone else had missed (according to the book). In the process though, he made these approaches his own and did not always appear to acknowledge their source or in fact recognise that they were not his own.
The book has several tedious bits. Apparently Thomson enjoyed a good argument and employed a Peter Tait as his bulldog in the journals. The book spends an inordinate amount of time on these discussions for my taste, especially on the arguments as to who came up with a particular concept. It also delves too deeply into his early years at Cambridge. Nevertheless the book manages to imbue all these great people with aspects of their humanity and makes it a worthwhile read. It also shows us how great ideas do not often develop as a single flash of genius but are based on ideas that came before. Despite chauvinistic claims there are smart people everywhere and they worked together either collaboratively or competitively to create the world we have today.
Thomson was one of those guys that we love to hate: brilliant, good looking, gregarious, personable, and excelled at sports. He was born into an academic family and was destined for great things at an early age. He attended Cambridge University to much acclaim and academic success and then returned to take up an academic post in Glasgow in 1846. At that point very little was known of heat and energy, light, electricity and magnetism. In fact according to the book, physics as we know it (it was known as Natural Philosophy) was not codified until the 1860s by Thomson and Peter Tait in their multi-volume book that covered the discoveries and developments that had taken place in the two decades.
Apparently Thomson was much taken and completely absorbed Fourier’s analysis of heat flow. He then started creating the mathematics around the first law of thermodynamics and was right in the thick of things in propounding the law of conservation of energy. Much of the book is taken up with who was the first to come up with what concept, but there are many names that pop up in this field as it further moved to the second law of thermodynamics and conceptualising entropy. Carnot, Clausius, Stokes and Joule are all his contemporaries and were all in contact through journals and correspondence (actually Carnot was a little before). If that was all, it would have been enough to establish his name in the halls of fame. But wait, there’s more…
Michael Faraday had come up with the concept of magnetic fields, but he was unable to express it in scientific terms for two reasons. Firstly he did not have the mathematical skills and secondly he did not have the vocabulary to describe it. Actually, that’s not fair- nobody had the vocabulary. Reading some if the correspondence, even with the stilted Victorian prose, you can’t help but note how they were struggling to match phenomena with words. Terms like ether, flux and vortex are bandied around as they tried to firstly describe and then quantify their observations as they evolved. Faraday regarded Thomson as the only person who managed to understand his concepts and express them mathematically.
Thomson had an immensely practical side to him and managed to apply theory into practice, being one of the first to take scientific principles and translate them into practical applications. If you don’t think that sounds like engineering, consider this. He was involved in the establishment of the undersea cable from Europe to North America and the elsewhere right from the get-go including the problems of insulation and cable weight in addition to transmission issues. The Morse signals were impaired as a result of the resistance and leakage of the cables and Thomson developed a galvanometer that sensitive enough to enable the signals to be read reliably (Edison was trained on one). As a later development he tried and largely succeeded to get a pen output to provide a permanent record of the transmission. He came up with a technique of charging the ink to get it out the nozzle which is the same technique used in ink-jet printers today. Even if this was not enough to convince you of the nascence of engineering, Sir William learned about the patenting process and patented all his products establishing himself as an incredibly wealthy man. The wealth probably had more to do with his elevation to the aristocracy than his science.
At the time there was no method of measuring electric current. In fact they didn’t even know what to call it. There were arguments on how to measure resistance including concepts from Wheatstone and Siemens. Because of its derivation from the concept of work done developed by Joule, resistance was initially measured in kilometres per second! Thomson was deeply involved in the development of the standards and even developed the first calibrated galvanometer to aid in the measurement of resistance. The names of the electrical units approximating the ones we use today appear to have been apportioned by chauvinistic considerations at a meeting in 1881 that included luminaries like Helmholtz, a close friend of Thomson. People involved with electricity including Thomson were inevitably called “electricians” which morphed into “telegraph engineers” before becoming “electrical engineer” in the 1880s.
Despite all this, like all of us he also had some flaws. There were contradictions for a start. He loved the Scottish landscape, but had no qualms converting Niagara Falls in a giant power generation scheme so that no water flowed over the falls. He was a great friend of Westinghouse despite his (Thomson`s) preference of DC over AC . He refused to accept the Theory of Evolution because according to his calculations based on the loss of heat from the earth, the earth could be no more than 100 million years old. Notwithstanding this he chose to defer to a religious defence when discussing evolution. He could not accept Maxwell’s explanation of electromagnetic radiation because he could not understand how it could pass through a vacuum. He always wanted a mechanical model to explain the phenomenon despite the fact that Maxwell`s treatise seemed to match Faraday’s original concepts. Even after Heaviside transformed Maxwell’s equations into the elegant form that we use today, he could not accept it. He did not believe that an element could change into another element even with the evidence of radium. He was limited by the concepts of his time and background and at the end of his life his approach of mechanical modelling of everything no longer could explain the new science. This is a point also made by Bill Bryson in his “A Short History of Nearly Everything” about how Michael Faraday’s deep religious beliefs hampered his understanding of electro-magnetism.
Thomson’s brilliance was the ability to combine different peoples’ work and theories to create an explanation that everyone else had missed (according to the book). In the process though, he made these approaches his own and did not always appear to acknowledge their source or in fact recognise that they were not his own.
The book has several tedious bits. Apparently Thomson enjoyed a good argument and employed a Peter Tait as his bulldog in the journals. The book spends an inordinate amount of time on these discussions for my taste, especially on the arguments as to who came up with a particular concept. It also delves too deeply into his early years at Cambridge. Nevertheless the book manages to imbue all these great people with aspects of their humanity and makes it a worthwhile read. It also shows us how great ideas do not often develop as a single flash of genius but are based on ideas that came before. Despite chauvinistic claims there are smart people everywhere and they worked together either collaboratively or competitively to create the world we have today.
August 26, 2014
Wow - I haven't read a book that bored me to this extent in a long time. The author didn't seem to know what to include and what not to include, so you get a lot of very long-winded bunny trails and technical explanations that completely left me in the dust. Pretty much any person encountered is given a mini-biography (whether they play a small or large part in the story), which got to be quite tiresome.
Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) was an interesting character, though, and had a lot of influence on our modern day understanding of thermodynamics. He also helped extensively with the laying of transatlantic telegraph wires, which was quite the endeavor that included many frustrated attempts and spanned many years. Definitely was glad to finish this book. Yay. Got that behind me.
Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) was an interesting character, though, and had a lot of influence on our modern day understanding of thermodynamics. He also helped extensively with the laying of transatlantic telegraph wires, which was quite the endeavor that included many frustrated attempts and spanned many years. Definitely was glad to finish this book. Yay. Got that behind me.
September 15, 2014
Another one of those books that makes me wish we taught science as more of a struggle to find answers than a clearly defined string of discoveries. Lord Kelvin is now relatively unknown despite all his numerous contributions to various areas of Natural Science and this book does a great job of reflecting on the people behind the discoveries and the conflicts between them. A long slog though because it is a bit dry and detailed but once you get into his productive years, it's amazing to see what he accomplished with no limit to his curiosity.
June 23, 2018
A true Victorian genius, both as scientist and inventor, Lindley highlights the many things Kelvin got many things right while not hiding those few he did not.
January 28, 2013
Excellent book. An interesting biography and unstandable science for a non-science person like me.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews