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1. Cambridge
Pages 11-63

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From page 11...
... With his father lames Thomson, professor of mathematics at Glasgow University, he had made the tedious trip from Scotland to eastern England: mail coach from Glasgow to Carlisle, in northwestern England, where they spent the night; another coach across the country to the eastern seaport of Hull; across the Humber estuary in a little steamboat; and finally on to Cambridge in another coach, arriving in the late evening. Professor Thomson managed to get an inside seat, but William had to perch on top until they got to Bedford, 30 miles west of Cambridge.
From page 12...
... Accustomed to hiking around the lonely lochs and spectacular mountains of Scotland, he found the flat, empty landscape around Cambridge disheartening, but soon he was out walking and talking with his fellow undergraduates. Conversation and burgeoning friendships pushed the dreary landscape into the background.
From page 13...
... He knew P.Q.R.'s identity and was eager tO meet the young man. And so a few days after his father left, William Thomson called on Gregory to discuss not only a brief addendum to his first P.Q.R.
From page 14...
... On these trips William Thomson halfheartedly kept a diary. Before going on to Paris, the family had stayed almost a month in London, where Robert, the youngest son, underwent surgery to remove a stone.
From page 15...
... There his career in physics began; there he acquired a perspective (it would be too grand to say philosophy) on mathematical science that he maintained, for good and ill, throughout his life.
From page 16...
... When he was just 15, William Thomson heard the Glasgow astronomy professor John Pringle Nichol praise Fourier during his lectures. He asked Nichol whether he should read the Theorie Arlalytique.
From page 17...
... . I took Fourier out of the University Library; and in a fortnight I had mastered it gone right through it." Either way, Fourier undoubtedly had a formative influence on William Thomson's scientific thinking.
From page 18...
... He constructed series in a number of slightly different but essentially equivalent ways and would jump from one to another, depending on which was more convenient for a particular problem, without always making it clear what he was up to. But William Thomson had the wit to see that Fourier reached the right conclusions despite his occasional sloppiness and
From page 19...
... Established just four years earlier by the young mathematicians Gregory and Archibald Smith, the fournalaimed to provide a venue in English for the new kind of mathematical physics that the French especially were developing. It was at lames Thomson's insistence that William disguised himself as P.Q.R.
From page 20...
... It is an adult work. During his three undergraduate years William published a dozen papers in the Camiorid~ge Mathematical Journal.
From page 21...
... Despite William's precocious ability and prodigious achievements, lames Thomson suffered from a constant fear that Cambridge would seduce his son away from a rigorous intellectual path into a dissolute and purposeless life of wine parties, rowing, and the reading of light novels. Born to a poor farming family in what is now Northern Ireland, lames Thomson had doggedly used his intellectual talents to build himself a sound and solid life, resisting along the way any distraction.
From page 22...
... 22 tradition, and no urgent concern to find a career or profession. These students generally left the university with an ordinary rather than an honors degree, which still bestowed on them the right to regale friends and family with stories of their time at Cambridge.
From page 23...
... ~tyo should scarcely go to ally others, and if you do go, observe the strictest caution, and always tell me about any thing you find. In more advanced years, you will see that my cautions are well founded." William replied with casual reassurance: "With regard to wine parties, I have gone to as few as I possibly could, and at any to which I have gone there has not been the least approach to excess....
From page 24...
... But he was not in person as dour as all that. John Nichol, son of Professor Nichol and playmate to the younger Thomson children, recalled Professor Thomson thus: "Good-hearted, he was shrewdly alive to his interest, without being selfish, and would put himself to some trouble, and even expense, to assist his friends.
From page 25...
... The religious ramifications in Scotland of the Civil War in England verge on the incomprehensible (as well as the Covenanters, there were the Protesters, the Remonstrancers, the Resolutionists, and others) , which is one reason the repercussions linger in Northern Ireland to this day.
From page 26...
... During their mother's decline, Elizabeth recalled, lames Thomson strained to keep his grief to himself and present only a sturdy figure to his children. Once, unseen, she saw him emerge from their mother's bedroom and was "frightened to see my beautiful father, so tall and strong,
From page 27...
... That very evening the five oldest children were summoned to their father's study. "He was sitting there alone, at the side of the fire," Elizabeth recalled years later.
From page 28...
... Huddled in College Court, they made the acquaintance of other academic families, notably that of John Pringle Nichol, who introduced William to Fourier a few years later. John Nichol, the professor's son, remembered Elizabeth and Anna as "both clever, good talkers and sketchers." One of them (he diplomatically doesn't say which)
From page 29...
... His tutors and fellow undergraduates at Cambridge recalled him as a charming and sociable young man. "A most engaging boy, brimful of fun and mischief, a high intellectual forehead, with fair, curly hair and a beauty that was almost girlish," recalled one contemporary years later.
From page 30...
... Then it was all mathematics. For the second and third years he studied mainly with his private tutor, or coach, William Hopkins.
From page 31...
... The top man was senior wrangler, the seconc! junior wrangler; positions were reporter!
From page 32...
... An apt question, like a nifty crossword clue, was a praiseworthy construction in itself.4 Peter Guthrie Tait, another Scottish student who became a close friend of William Thomson, was senior wrangler in 1852. As one who had survived with distinction a difficult and painful ordeal, he was later scathing about the Cambridge system.
From page 33...
... The greatest proportion of senior and junior wranglers, as it happens, went on to careers as ministers in the Church of England. Mathematics afforded few professional opportunities, beyond a few Oxbridge fellowships and a clutch of professorial chairs at the four Scottish universities that or schoolmastering.
From page 34...
... Hopkins saw how rational analysis could be brought to bear on all manner of questions but in the case of his exceptional pupil William Thomson, this was a superfluous lesson. Even before he began his coaching with Hopkins, William had published a third paper in the Camio ridge Mathematical fourrlal of February 1842.
From page 35...
... , forces between electric charges were conveyed along curved lines, something like intangible elastic strings; these lines, moreover, repelled each other and so distributed themselves as economically as possible through space, creating a tension that we now recognize as the electric field. These were vague notions, and William Thomson remained skeptical for some time of Faraday's powerful but allusive insights.
From page 36...
... William himself suffered doubts from time to time. For a few months in early 1843, halfway through his second year, he kept an intermittent diary of his undergraduate routine and habits, and more interestingly of his fears and anxieties.5 A student from Germany named Ludwig Fischer aroused concern: "I must read very hard and try to be at least as well prepared as he 5This notebook is the only truly personal record of William Thomson's that has survived, and like his earlier diaries of the visits to Europe, it is for the most part halfhearted and desultory.
From page 37...
... In conversations with friends the idea came up that he might take up the law for a profession, as the Glasgow mathematician Archibald Smith eventually did. "I have pretty nearly determined to go to the Chancery bar, if something else do not succeed, though I cannot get over the idea of cutting mathematics," he confided to his diary on February 19 (employing a now obsolete subjunctive)
From page 38...
... Aspects of the tale may have struck a nerve with William Thomson. Like Evelina, he was a young provincial full of talent and promise.
From page 39...
... William Thomson could expect no such absurd denouement. If he felt at all uneasy in Cambridge, out of his depth with people whose style and manners were strange to him, unsure of his future, he could expect no miraculous lifeline.
From page 40...
... From London at the end of May, lames Thomson wrote warmly of his visit: "With my trip to Cambridge I have been much gratified. I am glad to say that what I saw and heard of you was very satisfactory.
From page 41...
... In late 1843, though he resumed his studies with a vengeance, he also kept up with rowing. At the end of November William wrote cheerily to his sister Anna that although he had to catch up on a lot of work for Hopkins "I am practicing now everyday for a great skulling race wh will take place on Tuesday.
From page 42...
... William Thomson's mathematical prowess showed itself early, but at Cambridge, for a few months, as he turned 19, a different sensibility briefly awoke. By the end of 1843, however, these intrusive and unsettling feelings had been put to rest.
From page 43...
... The following summer, 1844, William Hopkins organized an extra session of mathematical coaching at Cromer, on the East Anglian coast overlooking the North Sea. "This is a very pleasant place, for England, and especially for Norfolk, wh is rather remarkable for its dullness," William reported to his father.
From page 44...
... William should be an exception among senior wranglers. so great 1 ~ ~ ' ~ by now was his reputation.
From page 45...
... James Along with James Thomson, William Thomson the elder, and David Thomson, all unrelated, there were also the brothers Thomas Thomson, professor of chemistry, and Allen Thomson, professor of anatomy.
From page 46...
... William Thomson, the medical man, concerning Meikleham's successor: "I felt ... I ought to mention to him my views regarding you....
From page 47...
... In all probability, he will not survive another." That spring William spent a week or so in London, staying with his older brother lames, who was then apprenticed to an engineering firm in Millwall. He also visited Archibald Smith, who despite taking up the law advised William to stick with science.
From page 48...
... Dr. William Thomson kept up with advice to his younger namesake, suggesting he try writing a popular lecture on some scientific subject to prove that there was more to him than rarefied mathematics.
From page 49...
... A firsthand account comes from Charles Arthur Bristed, an American student who wrote a memoir of his five years among the natives: This present year, however, one of the Small College men [i.e. William Thomson]
From page 50...
... He saw more than the typical examined and was duly penalized. When students and faculty gathered at the Senate House on lanuary 17 to see the results posted on the notice board, it was William Thomsons friends who were downcast.
From page 51...
... He does no such thing, he is very proud of his son and not in the slightest degree less pleased with him since the small humiliation he has met with." It was lames Thomson's perennial weakness not to be wholehearted in any judgment until he had obtained authoritative support. From Hopkins he soon received a lengthy and unreserved testament to his son's abilities: "I confess that your son's not being senior wrangler is to me a very great disappointment.
From page 52...
... The Smith's prize examination came after the honors tripes and was reckoned to be a deeper test of scientific understanding than the mad race to be wrangler. Each year students tried to answer a number of long questions on mathematical physics rather than pure mathematical methods.
From page 53...
... Charles Coulomb and lean-Baptiste Biot had established laws for forces acting between electric charges and simple magnets. Andre-Marie Ampere measured interactions between magnets and electric currents and proposed a sophisticated mathematical theory that held sway for a decade or two.
From page 54...
... What the French called la physique aimed to combine experimental investigation and mathematical sophistication into a seamless whole. In 1816 Biot published a textbook, Traite de Physique Experimerltale et Mathematique setting out what we would now call (to use a much abused word)
From page 55...
... The British were content to come up with satisfactory accounts of each of these subjects on their own terms. By the time William Thomson studied at Cambridge, Whewell was ironically beginning to seem like part of the old guard, resistant to further continental scientific innovations (the "despotic Whewell," William once called him in a letter to his father, because of his resistance to change in the mathematical tripes)
From page 56...
... According to Faraday, the charges created a state of electric tension pervading the whole of space around them, and the force acting on any one charge arose from the electric tension where that charge resided. William showed that the pictures came to the same thing, however one looked at it, and for static arrangements of charges nothing more need be said.
From page 57...
... As the new industrial economy grew, steam power became an ever more important founciation for national prosperity. In Britain, birthplace of the practical steam engine, inventors anct amateur scientists continucct to develop the new technology in laissez-faire style.
From page 58...
... William Thomson, urged his son to get promises of a testimonial from any great Parisian he happened to meet, no matter how slight the occasion. William wrote of the wonderful things he was learning and the ideas he discussed with Regnault, Liouville, Cauchy, and the rest.
From page 59...
... The following February lames Thomson informed his son that a teacher of mathematics at the Glasgow High School was ill and would probably soon die, and wondered if William might make a move for the position. William's reply makes clear that he was beginning to establish his own life and would not go along with his father's every scheme to get him back to Glasgow.
From page 60...
... He reported that Dr. William Thomson was now worrying that young William suffered from "timidity and want of effective locution" and wondered if he could work up some sort of nonmathematical lecture of a general nature to assuage fears that "your ideas and expressions are bound up in the icy chains of x's and y's, +'s and -'s." William hardly bothered make any reply to these further charges, the possibility of calming his father seemed so hopeless.
From page 61...
... will I am sure have more influence without many others than if they were overwhelmed in a flood of testimonials from people who do not understand what is wanted for a professor of Natural Philosophy." William could never act with sufficient vigor to convince his father he was in earnest. James Thomson mentioned the Lord Rector of Glasgow University, Rutherford, and the Dean, Maconochie: "Could you 'get at them'?
From page 62...
... Hopkins was careful to add a sentence about William's easy manner and amiable nature as a teacher, which led lames Thomson to decide his testimonial was the best of the bunch. Cookson, the college tutor, concluded with: "He is already blessed with a reputation which veterans in science might envy, but his friends look for still greater lustre....
From page 63...
... Archibald Smith never applied for the Glasgow chair. On September 1 1, 1846, the faculty met and unanimously selected William Thomson to be the new professor of natural philosophy.


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