Skip to main content

Currently Skimming:

6. Kelvin
Pages 260-308

The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.


From page 260...
... Scholars from around the country mingled with prominent Glaswegian businessmen and politicians. Stokes, now Sir George Gabriel Stokes, came from Cambridge.
From page 261...
... William Thomson, later Sir William, now Lord Kelvin, had been a Glasgow professor for 50 years since taking up his post at the age of 22. The only position that might have drawn him away was the Cavendish chair at Cambridge, which he had in the end refused three times: at the outset, when Maxwell was appointed; again when Maxwell died in 1879, and the chair eventually went to Lord Rayleigh; and once more when Rayleigh
From page 262...
... Joseph John Thomson, invariably known as I I., was a 28-year-old physicist from Manchester, second wrangler in 1880, to whom William Thomson's old friend and colleague lames Joule was a distinguished but by then frail and impoverished man, supported by a government pension after he had lost money through failed investments.
From page 263...
... A great-niece of Kelvin's, granddaughter of his sister Elizabeth, wrote that the word failure "seemed to ring through the hall with half-sad, half-yearning emphasis. Some of the people tried to laugh incredulously, but he was too much in earnest for that." Kelvin moved swiftly on, to talk of the joy of experimental discovery, of the innumerable inventions and marvelous devices that scientific study had brought into being in the second half of the 1 9th century.
From page 264...
... Kelvin also, and in similar isolation from the mainstream, cultivated his own view of atoms and molecules. As long ago as lanuary 1867, only a few months after the successful conclusion of the Atlantic cable venture, the newly minted Sir William Thomson had presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh a long account of what he called "vortex atoms." His ideas, as always, combined novelties gleaned from other sources.
From page 265...
... The idea that matter consisted of small, hard atoms had ancient roots, but the modern theory, arising in the middle of the 19th century, owed most to the efforts of Clausius, Maxwell, and Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna. If a gas consisted of tiny atoms speeding about and colliding constantly with each other, as kinetic theory held, then the overall properties of the gas ought to follow directly from consideration of the behavior of the atoms, as dictated by simple Newtonian mechanics.
From page 266...
... The collision of two rings was a difficult though "perfectly solvable mathematical problem," Thomson wrote. "Its solution will be the foundation of the proposed new kinetic theory of gases." Beyond that, the vibrations and oscillations of vortex rings, which Thomson had amused himself with in Tait's laboratory by poking at a smoke ring with his finger, had the capacity tO explain spectroscopy.
From page 267...
... Maxwell himself, speaking at the British Association meeting in 1870, endorsed Thomson's proposal as a project worthy of serious investigation and said that if it succeeded the constitution of the physical world would be "noth· 1 1 · '' ng out matter and motion. Thomson latched onto this marvelous, intoxicating vision without reservation.
From page 268...
... And do not frown. The paper then discussed some propositions concerning wave motion in electromagnetic theory.
From page 269...
... As the scope of electrical technology blossomed, the Society of Telegraph Engineers transformed itself in 1888 into the Institution of Electrical Engineers. As well the telephone, industrial and domestic electricity were on the rise.
From page 270...
... 270 parents in Devon, barely surviving on their meager resources. He had a brother living nearby but hardly ever visited "because he thought the cart-men shouted abuse at him." Around this time he was put up for membership in the Royal Society, a process that resembled entry into the baseball hall of fame.
From page 271...
... Not only do the equations become simpler, but their meaning becomes more transparent. Using this compact and elegant notation, Heaviside was able to provide a more rigorous statement of the mathematical properties of the electromagnetic field than Maxwell had been able to do, and this in turn led to a more fit is a curiosity of nature that electric charges exist but that their magnetic counterparts do not.
From page 272...
... proved that the electromagnetic field carried energy. It had been generally assumed that when electricity moved about, all the energy was carried by electric currents.
From page 273...
... The vector electric field and the scalar electric charge have distinct and separate physical identities. The corresponding quaternion, a combination of the two, does not.
From page 274...
... He thought they embraced a kind of mathematical formalism that distanced itself further from true physics the more formal it became. He hankered still after mechanical models of the ether, as he had in Baltimore.
From page 275...
... Rather remarkably, Thomson's views on Maxwell merited occasional mention in the newspapers, in the way that momentous meaning was teased out of official pronouncements from the Kremlin in the last days of the Soviet Union. At the 1888 British Association meeting in Bath, the correspondent from the Times reported with extreme circumspection that "Sir William Thomson in one paper cautiously made what must be regarded as a somewhat noteworthy admission with reference to ClerkMaxwell's fundamental theory....
From page 276...
... The electromagnetic properties of the ether are a much better key to its properties than light waves, and I cannot see, nor apparently can you, how it can be both electric and magnetic and at the same time an elastic solid." The ether had by this time come under experimental as well as theoretical attack. In 1887, at the Case Research Institute (now Case Western Reserve University)
From page 277...
... In his theory the ether simply vanished, and so came to an end half a century of strenuous and increasingly baroque efforts to construct mechanical models of the ether, none of which ever proved satisfactory. At the British Association meeting of 1892 in Edinburgh, the presidential address was delivered by Archibald Geikie, a Scottish geologist and friend of Kelvin.
From page 278...
... "Some assumption, it seems to me, has been made, or some consideration has been left out of sight, which will eventually be seen to vitiate the conclusions," he told his audience. "After careful reflection on the subject, I affirm that the geological record furnishes a mass of evidence which no arguments drawn from other departments of Nature can explain away, and which, it seems to me, cannot be satisfactorily interpreted save with an allowance of time much beyond the narrow limits which recent physical speculation would concede." A wary impasse reigned.
From page 279...
... "My dear old George," he wrote, "All of us are delighted, for considering what a man Sir William Thomson is, it is most grand that you should have staggered him so quickly, and that he should speak of your 'discovery, etc.' .
From page 280...
... "Under these circumstances, I cannot think that any estimate having any pretension to accuracy can be made as to the present rate of tidal friction," he concluded. Of course, this simply meant that the tidal argument was of no use in Thomson's battle with the geologists and biologists.
From page 281...
... By solving this more complex mathematical problem, in which he had assistance from Oliver Heaviside, Perry showed that with a not excessively outrageous choice of thermal properties for the interior, he could obtain strikingly different conclusions about the age of the earth. The starting point (a uniformly molten sphere)
From page 282...
... Perry had pointed out a difficulty, but neither he nor Kelvin (and certainly not Tait) was able to come up with any sound estimate of what the heat loss argument now said about the age of the earth.
From page 283...
... He told them Tait's oft-repeated views were "entirely indefensible.... The obligation is all on the other side, and rests with those who have pressed their conclusions hard and carried them far," and concluded roundly that "Natural Selection will never be stifled in the Procrustean bed of insufficient geological time." At the same meeting George Darwin began his lecture to the phys ;1cists by saying "amongst the many transcendent services rendered to science by Sir William Thomson, it is not the least that he has turned the searching light of the theory of energy on to the science of geology," but then he went on to enumerate the mounting difficulties.
From page 284...
... " Equally, however, Maxwell saw the virtues of the coming methods for dealing with electromagnetism. At the 1870 British Association meeting he spoke favorably of helpful mathematical innovations that "can
From page 285...
... "Like most problems in vortex motion," he recalled in his dry but oddly humorous way, it "involved long and complicated mathematical analysis, and took a long time." Few besides William Thomson saw in the increasing complexity and difficulty of vortex analysis the prospect of a universal theory. Most, like the Maxwellians, sought to pare and simplify.
From page 286...
... He could not find a satisfactory ether model, but neither would he accept the bare mathematical formalism of the Maxwellians. "It is mere nihilism, having no part or lot in Natural Philosophy, to be contented with two formulas for energy, electromagnetic and electrostatic, and to be happy with a vector and rir~licrktr~r]
From page 287...
... lames Thomson Bottomley, son of his long-dead sister Anna, was his assistant in Glasgow, generally lived with him there or at Netherhall, performed experiments for him, and lectured frequently when Kelvin was away on business. Elizabeth had three surviving children, her daughters Elizabeth and Agnes, to whom Kelvin remained close, and a son George who figures little in family tales.
From page 288...
... In Kelvin's unconstrained company it was impossible to indulge in formalities, and Helmholtz gladly let go the attempt. At the Edinburgh British Association meeting in 1892, "Helmholtz and Uncle William were inseparable, and both spoke a good deal in the sections," a niece reported.5 Helmholtz, who was not as powerful a mathematician as Kelvin, had a stronger and simpler sense of physics.
From page 289...
... On the other hand, when Stokes was speaking, Kelvin would butt in after almost every sentence with some idea which had just occurred to him, and which he could not suppress." On just one occasion, when Kelvin was talking wildly about atoms, Stokes got his dander up enough to resist: "He was so much in earnest that Kelvin for once could not get a word in edgeways: as soon as he started to speak, Stokes raised his hand in a solemn way and, as it were, pushed Kelvin back into his seat." If physics, or rather natural philosophy, represented by this time a source of frustration and even failure to Kelvin, he enjoyed compensations in the form of his reputation and public demand for his pronouncements. In 1897 the British Association met again in Canada, this time in Toronto.
From page 290...
... In 1890 he had been invited by an American consortium to serve as chairman of an international commission to study the feasibility of electricity generation from Niagara Falls, an idea first seriously proposed by William Siemens in 1887. As early as 1879, however, Kelvin had spoken to a British parliamentary committee on the advantages of electricity over gas for lighting and industrial purposes and said then that he "believed the Falls of Niagara would in the future be used for the production of light and mechanical power over a large area of North America." By 1893 the international commission had chosen a
From page 291...
... Speaking to the British Parliament two decades earlier, Kelvin had talked of thick copper conductors in the form of tubes, with cooling water running down them, able to transmit power for hundreds of miles. Since then, however, he had thought more closely about the economics of power loss and formulated what has sometimes been called Kelvin's law of power transmission:
From page 292...
... . would be found by comparing the annual interest on the money value of the copper with the money value of the energy lost in it annually in the heat generated in it by the electric current." Guided by this principle he now estimated that electricity could travel up to 300 miles with acceptable power loss, if 20,000 volts were used, but he recoiled from such large potentials.
From page 293...
... George Westinghouse, a railway entrepreneur, heard the talk and promptly hired Tesla away from Edison to design power transmission systems using the new technology. Edison, a devout direct current man, started a campaign assailing the dangers of alternating current, the height of which involved proposing that a man sent to the electric chair should be said to have been "westinghoused" or "consigned to the Westinghouse." The suggestion that alternating current is fearsomely dangerous while direct current is pleasantly safe seems absurd, when a few thousand volts of either will satisfactorily kill anyone.
From page 294...
... It was why he favored the precise arguments of physics limiting the lifetimes of the earth and the sun over the woolly speculations of geologists and biologists. It was why, in a broader sense, he insisted on literally mechanical models of ether and atoms and would not succumb to the nihilism of the Maxwellians, who were willing to accept a mathematical structure based on no tangible model.
From page 295...
... "For instance, the eggs were always boiled in an eggboiler on the table, and Lord Kelvin would wish to boil them by mathematical rule and economy of fuel, with preliminary measurements by the millimetre scale, and so on," the physicist Joseph Larmor recalled. In more serious matters, Kelvin's insistence on simplicity of thought came across as naivete.
From page 296...
... They interacted with atoms of ordinary matter through a complicated force law. A neutral atom contained a certain number of electrions; with too few or too many, an atom acquired an overall electric charge.
From page 297...
... Not too many years earlier Kelvin had hoped his vortex atoms, in which the only ingredients were a suitable ether and Newtonian mechanics, would provide a universal explanation of matter. But that project had failed, and Kelvin reached back to the 1 8th century for ideas that had been proposed as philosophical speculations but never developed into mathematical theory.
From page 298...
... In 1902 he and Lady Kelvin embarked on another trip to the United States, his fourth and last. It was a triumphal tour.
From page 299...
... His courteous, unaffected manner puts one at ease at once." Kelvin held forth on electric power transmission ("a success .
From page 300...
... "He is too exact in his methods to announce a conclusion prematurely, although he is wonderfully quick to grasp details and is as keen for information on the subject like the water power of the Genesee as a newspaper reporter." Though the Rochester journalist could not know it, this was his attitude to ether models and atomic theories too. Once the concept was set down, it was a matter of working out all the details, and unless all the details could be got right at once, no solution was yet acceptable.
From page 301...
... Kelvin proposed instead a system of 20 direct current generators at 2,000 volts each, connected in series to produce 40,000 volts, which would satisfactorily transmit power up to 100 miles with acceptable losses. As Kelvin elaborated on his plan, the reporter "covertly pinched himself, to make sure that he was not dreaming." After an hour of these thrilling revelations, Kelvin talked briefly of his fascination with the camera works he had seen in Rochester.
From page 302...
... At the British Association meeting in September of that year there was a demonstration of a little piece of radium making the mercury rise in an ordinary thermometer. One scientist commented that this phenomenon "can barely be distinguished from the discovery of perpetual motion, which it is an axiom of science to call impossible, landl has left every chemist and physicist in a state of bewilderment." It seemed like energy from nowhere, appearing out of an otherwise inert mineral.
From page 303...
... Lord Rayleigh's son, Robert Strutt, who became the fourth Lord Rayleigh in 1919 when his father died, was among those who established the possibility of dating rocks by assaying the radioactive decay products they contained. Soon, ages of hundreds of millions of years were spoken of for perfectly ordinary minerals in the earth's crusts.
From page 304...
... When the Boer War erupted in 1899 between British forces and rebellious Afrikaaners, Tait rejoiced that his son signed up and went to South Africa to fight. Young Tait was brave in a way that tends to excite mockery today a good-hearted, good-looking, cheery sporting fellow, by no means an intellectual, sailing out eagerly and unquestioningly to the fringe of the empire to defend British pride and power.
From page 305...
... Occasionally there are personal remarks in the gruff style of Victorian men, such as when each announces to the other that he is about to be married. "My principal intelligence must belong to the non-scientific head which is that I am engaged to be married to Miss Robinson daughter of Dr Robinson," Stokes informed William Thomson in 1856, in an unpunctuated rush.
From page 306...
... The appearance, between those milestones, of Kelvin's fantastically elaborated mechanical models of the ether, supplemented with new materials such as his curious essay "Aepinus Atomized," was a bizarre anachronism. Details had changed to accommodate new discoveries, but the intellectual foundation of this project remained what it had been in Baltimore a mechanical universe, in the old-fashioned Newtonian clockwork sense.
From page 307...
... "Whatever opinion may be formed of the merits of the controversy, all must unite on admiration for the boldness with which Lord Kelvin initiated his campaign, and the intellectual keenness with which he conducted, almost single-handed, what appeared to many from the first almost a forlorn hope against the transmutational and evolutionary doctrines framed to account for the properties of radium. The weight of years and the almost unanimous opinion of his younger colleagues against him have not deterred him from leading a lost cause, if not to a victorious termination, at least to one from which no one will grudge him the honours of war." Even Ernest Rutherford, the great pioneer of radioactivity and atomic theory, who had written to his mother years ago of his admiration for Kelvin, could not help but think of the aging natural philosopher as a child.
From page 308...
... Kelvin was in the audience. In his much-retold account, Rutherford recalled that "to my relief, Kelvin fell fast asleep, but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye, and cock a baleful glance at me!


This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More information on Chapter Skim is available.