- Lindley, David.
Degrees Kelvin.
Washington: Joseph Henry Press, 2004.
ISBN 0-309-09618-9.
-
When 17 year old William Thomson arrived at Cambridge University to
study mathematics, Britain had become a backwater of
research in science and mathematics—despite the
technologically-driven industrial revolution being in
full force, little had been done to build upon the
towering legacy of Newton, and cutting edge work had
shifted to the Continent, principally France and Germany.
Before beginning his studies at Cambridge, Thomson had already
published three research papers in the
Cambridge Mathematical Journal, one of which
introduced Fourier's mathematical theory of heat
to English speaking readers, defending it against
criticism from those opposed to the highly analytical
French style of science which Thomson found congenial
to his way of thinking.
Thus began a career which, by the end of the 19th century,
made Thomson widely regarded as the preeminent scientist
in the world: a genuine scientific celebrity.
Over his long career Thomson fused the mathematical
rigour of the Continental style of research with the
empirical British attitude and made fundamental progress
in the kinetic theory of heat, translated Michael Faraday's
intuitive view of electricity and magnetism into a mathematical
framework which set the stage for Maxwell's formal
unification of the two in electromagnetic field theory, and
calculated the age of the Earth based upon heat flow from
the interior. The latter calculation, in which he
estimated only 20 to 40 million years, proved to be wrong,
but was so because he had no way to know about radioactive
decay as the source of Earth's internal heat: he was
explicit in stating that his result assumed no then-unknown
source of heat or, as we'd now say, “no new physics”.
Such was his prestige that few biologists and geologists whose
own investigations argued for a far more ancient Earth stepped
up and said, “Fine—so start looking for the new
physics!” With Peter Tait, he wrote the
Treatise on Natural Philosophy,
the first unified exposition of what we would now call
classical physics.
Thomson believed that science had to be founded in observations
of phenomena, then systematised into formal mathematics and
tested by predictions and experiments. To him, understanding
the mechanism, ideally based upon a mechanical model,
was the ultimate goal. Although acknowledging that Maxwell's
equations correctly predicted electromagnetic phenomena,
he considered them incomplete because they didn't explain
how or why electricity and magnetism behaved that way. Heaven
knows what he would have thought of quantum mechanics (which was
elaborated after his death in 1907).
He'd probably have been a big fan of string theory, though. Never
afraid to add complexity to his mechanical models, he spent two
decades searching for a set of 21 parameters which would describe
the mechanical properties of the luminiferous ether—what
string “landscape” believers might call the moduli
and fluxes of the vacuum, and argued for a “vortex atom”
model in which extended vortex loops replaced pointlike billiard
ball atoms to explain spectrographic results. These speculations
proved, as they say,
not even wrong.
Thomson was not an ivory tower theorist. He viewed the occupation
of the natural philosopher (he disliked the word “physicist”)
as that of a problem solver, with the domain of problems encompassing
the practical as well as fundamental theory. He was a central
figure in the development of the first transatlantic telegraphic
cable and invented the mirror galvanometer which made telegraphy
over such long distances possible. He was instrumental in
defining the units of electricity we still use today. He invented
a mechanical analogue computer for computation of tide tables, and
a compass compensated for the magnetic distortion of iron and steel
warships which became the standard for the Royal Navy. These inventions
made him wealthy, and he indulged his love of the sea by buying
a 126 ton schooner and inviting his friends and colleagues on
voyages.
In 1892, he was elevated to a peerage by Queen Victoria, made
Baron Kelvin of Largs, the first scientist ever so honoured.
(Numerous scientists, including Newton and
Thomson himself in 1866 had been knighted, but the award of a
peerage is an honour of an entirely different order.) When he
died in 1907 at age 83, he was buried in Westminster Abbey next
to the grave of Isaac Newton. For one who accomplished so much,
and was so celebrated in his lifetime, Lord Kelvin is largely
forgotten today, remembered mostly for the absolute temperature
scale named in his honour and, perhaps, for the Kelvinator company
of Detroit, Michigan which used his still-celebrated name to promote
their ice-boxes and refrigerators. While Thomson had his hand in
much of the creation of the edifice of classical physics in the
19th century, there isn't a single enduring piece of work you can
point to which is entirely his. This isn't indicative of any shortcoming
on his part, but rather of the maturation of science from rare leaps
of insight by isolated geniuses to a collective endeavour by
an international community reading each other's papers and
building a theory by the collaborative effort of many minds. Science
was growing up, and Kelvin's reputation has suffered, perhaps, not
due to any shortcomings in his contributions, but because they were
so broad, as opposed to being identified with a single discovery
which was entirely his own.
This is a delightful biography of a figure whose contributions
to our knowledge of the world we live in are little remembered. Lord
Kelvin never wavered from his belief that science consisted in
collecting the data, developing a model and theory to explain what
was observed, and following the implications of that theory to
their logical conclusions. In doing so, he was often presciently
right and occasionally spectacularly wrong, but he was always true
to science as he saw it, which is how most scientists see their
profession today.
Amusingly, the chapter titles are:
- Cambridge
- Conundrums
- Cable
- Controversies
- Compass
- Kelvin
September 2007 