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From page 309... ...
But in March 1907, in one of his last published papers, he argued again for a sort of rechargeable atom, which took up energy from its surroundings then released it in a sudden burst of disintegration. "Lord Kelvin preferred to regard the atom as a big gun loaded with an explosive shell," reported Nature from the BA.
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From page 310... ...
The pall bearers included Lord Rayleigh, the geologist Archibald Geikie, and George Darwin (Sir George by now) , who had been Kelvin's closest scientific confidante of the rising generation.
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From page 311... ...
". Kelvin was interred beside Isaac Newton, beneath a plain slab inscribed "William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, 1824-1907." As he was laid to rest the dean of the Abbey intoned the old words of the burial service, singularly inappropriate in this case: "Man that is born of woman Lath but a short time to live, and is full of misery." In writing about scientists of previous centuries and the mysteries they spent their lives trying to resolve, I have often wanted to speak back into the past, or bring these scientists forward to the present day, to show them how it all worked out.
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From page 312... ...
New discoveries and new aspects of knowledge crowding in upon him faster than he could express them to the world.... In the first half of his life, fundamental results arrived in such volume as to leave behind all chance of effective development." Kelvin had inspired Maxwell to start work on electromagnetism, Larmor noted, but Maxwell's "genius was as systematic as Thomson's was desultory." There was the problem: Kelvin thought fast, so fast, in fact, that he never stopped to think.
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From page 313... ...
The fact that he pursued an intellectual course largely alone, long after everyone else had abandoned it, and which turned out to be a historical dead end, has nothing to do with his skills of practical invention. Kelvin clung to his outdated view of a strictly mechanical universe because he sincerely believed it was the right line to take.
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From page 314... ...
Electromagnetic fields, likewise, are portrayed now not as continuous entities, elastic but abstract, pervading space, but as the manifestation of forces transmitted by quantum particles, specifically photons. Many physicists today who probe the universe at its most fundamental level of construction speak of superstrings and their offspring, lines and loops wiggling around in multidimensional spaces and creating for us, in our limited three-dimensional world, the appearance of point particles and continuous forces.
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From page 315... ...
EPILOGUE 315 endlessly ingenious pictures based on elementary principles and his fondness for adding mathematical complication to explain hard empirical phenomena, would after being taken aback by the dizzying scope of modern theoretical physics decide that, after all, it was exactly what he had been trying to say.
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