Degrees Kelvin: A Tale of Genius, Invention, and Tragedy - Hardcover

Lindley, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0309090733 ISBN 13: 9780309090735

Publisher: Joseph Henry Press, 2004

Synopsis

LORD KELVIN. In 1840, a precocious 16-year-old by the name of William Thomson spent his summer vacation studying an extraordinarily sophisticated mathematical controversy. His brilliant analysis inspired lavish praise and made the boy an instant intellectual celebrity.

As a young scholar William dazzled a Victorian society enthralled with the seductive authority and powerful beauty of scientific discovery. At a time when no one really understood heat, light, electricity, or magnetism, Thomson found key connections between them, laying the groundwork for two of the cornerstones of 19th century science—the theories of electromagnetism and thermodynamics.

Charismatic, confident, and boyishly handsome, Thomson was not a scientist who labored quietly in a lab, plying his trade in monkish isolation. When scores of able tinkerers were flummoxed by their inability to adapt overland telegraphic cables to underwater, intercontinental use, Thomson took to the high seas with new equipment that was to change the face of modern communications. And as the world's navies were transitioning from wooden to iron ships, they looked to Thomson to devise a compass that would hold true even when surrounded by steel.

Gaining fame and wealth through his inventive genius, Thomson was elevated to the peerage by Queen Victoria for his many achievements. He was the first scientist ever to be so honored. Indeed, his name survives in the designation of degrees Kelvin, the temperature scale that begins with absolute zero, the point at which atomic motion ceases and there is a complete absence of heat. Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was Great Britain's unrivaled scientific hero.

But as the century drew to a close and Queen Victoria's reign ended, this legendary scientific mind began to weaken. He grudgingly gave way to others with a keener, more modern vision. But the great physicist did not go quietly. With a ready pulpit at his disposal, he publicly proclaimed his doubts over the existence of atoms. He refused to believe that radioactivity involved the transmutation of elements. And believing that the origin of life was a matter beyond the expertise of science and better left to theologians, he vehemently opposed the doctrines of evolution, repeatedly railing against Charles Darwin. Sadly, this pioneer of modern science spent his waning years arguing that the Earth and the Sun could not be more than 100 million years old. And although his early mathematical prowess had transformed our understanding of the forces of nature, he would never truly accept the revolutionary changes he had helped bring about, and it was others who took his ideas to their logical conclusion.

In the end Thomson came to stand for all that was old and complacent in the world of 19th century science. Once a scientific force to be reckoned with, a leader to whom others eagerly looked for answers, his peers in the end left him behind—and then meted out the ultimate punishment for not being able to keep step with them. For while they were content to bury him in Westminster Abbey alongside Isaac Newton, they used his death as an opportunity to write him out of the scientific record, effectively denying him his place in history. Kelvin's name soon faded from the headlines, his seminal ideas forgotten, his crucial contributions overshadowed.

Destined to become the definitive biography of one of the most important figures in modern science, Degrees Kelvin unravels the mystery of a life composed of equal parts triumph and tragedy, hubris and humility, yielding a surprising and compelling portrait of a complex and enigmatic man.

About this title

About the Author

David Lindley holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Although he began his career as a working scientist with stints at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England, and at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, he soon turned his talents to writing about science. As the Quizmaster for a phone-in segment of Sounds Like Science, a weekly radio science magazine hosted by Ira Flatow, he brought science to the public in a fun an engaging way. He is also the author of several highly acclaimed books. The Wall Street Journal hailed his first book, The End of Physics, as "superbly written" while the Washington Post called it "as good as it gets." He received similar raves for Where Does the Wierdness Go?, The Science of Jurassic Park, and Botzmann s Atom. He also writes for Discover, New Scientist, Nature, and other major science publications. Lindley lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

From the Inside Flap

"David Lindley has done a superb job telling the fascinating story of Lord Kelvin, and has produced one of the most interesting scientist biographies ever written. Excellent book. Very well written." -- Amir D. Aczel, author of Pendulum: Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science and Fermat s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem

"Lord Kelvin had one of the greatest scientific minds of the 19th century and Degrees Kelvin is a first rate biography of him and his world." -- John Steele Gordon, author of A Thread Across the Ocean

Reviews

William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, was one of the 19th century's best-known scientists and inventors. As Lindley (Boltzmann's Atom; The End of Physics; etc.) so comprehensively explains, Kelvin (1824 1907) was largely responsible for the creation of the twin fields of electromagnetism and thermodynamics, and played a significant role in connecting England and America by transatlantic telegraph cable. Kelvin's work was so important and he was so well known that he became the first British scientist elevated to the peerage, and when he died, he was buried in Westminster Abbey near Isaac Newton. Yet, unlike other scientists of his and earlier times, Kelvin is no longer a household name. In his thoroughly engaging biography, Lindley expertly examines Kelvin's life and the thought processes of this mathematical genius as well as providing a rich overview of physics as it was created from what had been known as "natural philosophy." Lindley also does a superb job of explaining how, over the course of his life and by sticking to his basic scientific principles, Kelvin changed from an extraordinarily creative theoretician, in both the pure and the applied realms, to a scientific anachronism, defending outmoded ideas and refusing to accept new concepts. Lindley provides insight into a misunderstood scientific legend and into the process of science itself at a critical period of history.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), made major contributions to 19th-century physics and technology but is mainly known today through the attachment of his name to a scale of temperature. Lindley, an astrophysicist who now focuses on writing about science, brings Kelvin to life in this excellent biography. The young Kelvin, Lindley writes, "made astonishing progress in the quest to understand the nature of heat, work, and energy, and in the parallel effort to elucidate the nature of electricity and magnetism." Kelvin's theory of undersea signal transmission was fundamental for the installation of transatlantic cables, and he was involved in work on power generation and navigation instruments. The "tragedy" of the book's title is that the old Kelvin became something of a crank, sticking "with blind stubbornness" to ideas about radioactivity, electromagnetism and the age of the earth in the face of contrary evidence accumulating at the turn of the century. But if Kelvin could come back today, Lindley says, he "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."

Editors of Scientific American

This life of William Thomson intersects with author Lindley's previous biographical subject, physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (Boltzmann's Atom, 2001), at the junction of late-nineteenth-century debate about the composition of an atom. Thomson was in error in that and other scientific controversies, such as the age of the earth, and, consequently, his reputation has suffered. Thomson was probably the most famous scientist in the world at that time and was ennobled as Lord Kelvin for his accomplishments in thermodynamics and telegraphy, but as he aged, he was increasingly incapable of accepting new directions in physics. But such intellectual foibles, as well as Thomson's publicly visible work on the first transatlantic telegraph, furnish the raw material that a good biographer can make interesting. This Lindley is, and does. Supremely self-confident, Thomson, in Lindley's portrait, takes shape as remarkably inventive but unable to detach himself from a classical, mechanistic view, which the younger generation of physicists were able to do. Wherever science biographies are popular, Lindley's perceptive work will be, too. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Joseph Henry Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0309090733
• ISBN 13: 9780309090735
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 382