Figure 9

This was a fairly accurate, if humorous, description of the numerous accomplishments of the man dubbed by one of his biographers the “Dynamic Victorian.” On his ennoblement, in 1892, Thomson adopted the title Baron Kelvin of Largs, after the River Kelvin, which flowed close to his laboratory at the University of Glasgow. “Second Wrangler” referred to Kelvin having placed (to his disappointment) second in the final honors school of mathematics at Cambridge. Story has it that on the morning the examination results were to be posted, he sent his servant to find out “who is Second Wrangler?” and was devastated when he was told “You, sir!” There is no doubt that Kelvin was the foremost figure of the age that witnessed the end of classical physics and the birth of the modern era. Figure 9 shows a portrait of Lord Kelvin, possibly after a photograph taken in 1876. Appropriately, upon his death in 1907, he was laid to rest in a tomb alongside Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. What the eulogy did not capture, however, was the eventual collapse of Kelvin’s stature in scientific circles. As an old man, Kelvin developed a reputation as an obstructionist to modern physics. Often portrayed as someone who clung stubbornly to his old views, he resisted new findings about atoms and about radioactivity. More surprisingly, even though James Clerk Maxwell relied on some of Kelvin’s applications of energy principles when he developed his impressive theory of electromagnetism, Kelvin still objected to the theory, stating, “I may say that the one thing about it that seems intelligible to me, I do not think is admissible.” For the technically savvy person that he was, Kelvin made similarly astonishing declarations on technology, such as “I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aereal navigation other than ballooning.” It was this enigmatic man—brilliant as a young scientist, seemingly out of touch as an old one—who attempted to discredit the geologists’ views on the age of the Earth.

On April 28, 1862, Kelvin (then still Thomson) read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh a paper entitled “On the Secular Cooling of the Earth.” This paper followed closely on the heels of another article published just the month before, with the title “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat.” Thomson made clear from the opening sentence that this was not going to be just another forgettable technical essay. Here was a hard-line attack on the geologists’ assumption about the unchanging nature of the forces that had shaped the Earth:

For eighteen years it has pressed on my mind, that essential principles of Thermodynamics have been overlooked by those geologists who uncompromisingly oppose all paroxysmal hypotheses, and maintain not only that we have examples now before us, on the earth, of all the different actions by which its crust has been modified in geological history, but that these actions have never, or have not on the whole, been more violent in past time than they are at present.