Degrees Kelvin: A Tale of Genius, Invention, and Tragedy by David Lindley. Joseph Henry Press, $27.95, 366 pages.

The Chapel Hill News

January 12, 2005

Forgotten lord of science

By Phillip Manning

William Thompson, the most acclaimed physicist in the 19th century, was born in 1824 and became Lord Kelvin in 1892, the first scientist elevated to the peerage. When he died in 1907, he was buried next to Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. Today, he is largely forgotten. His story, superbly told by David Lindley in “Degrees Kelvin” (Joseph Henry Press, $27.95), is the cautionary tale of a scientist who tried to do too much.

Kelvin (for simplicity, I shall use his lordly name although he didn’t acquire it until late in life) was a mathematical whiz. At the tender age of eight, he was attending his father’s classes in mathematics at Glasgow University in Scotland. His fellow students were flabbergasted when the professor posed a difficult problem to the class and a fair-haired child would jump up, pleading, “Do, papa, let me answer!”

Before Kelvin finished Cambridge, he had published a dozen papers in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal. But he was not your stereotypical geek. Kelvin was handsome, energetic, and affable, making friends easily. This concerned his conservative father, whose own education had lifted him from the lower classes into the ranks of respected professors. He worried that his precocious son was frittering away time on extracurricular activities. But Kelvin could charm his father as well as his contemporaries. He bought a boat, convinced his father to pay for it, then won an important sculling race. In fact, Kelvin was in to everything at Cambridge, from mathematics and science to music and modern novels. This frenzied undertaking of disparate activities would characterize his life.

Despite distractions, Kelvin placed second in the mathematical tripos, a grueling series of exams that tests the student’s powers of regurgitation. He then won the Smith’s prize, a mathematical physics test that emphasizes analytical thinking. So obvious was his brilliance that one examiner reportedly remarked to another that “You and I are just about fit to mend his pens.”

Meanwhile, Kelvin’s father was strenuously lobbying for a university position for his son. It was no easy task writes Lindley, “In the whole of Great Britain no more than a handful of ... positions existed.” But his father came through, and at the age of 22, Kelvin accepted a job as professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow, teaching alongside his father. Working quickly, Kelvin established the first experimental physics lab in Great Britain, and despite later offers of a professorship at Cambridge, he remained at Glasgow for the rest of his life.

In the two decades following his university appointment, Kelvin did his most important scientific work. He helped develop the new science of heat engines, which he called thermodynamics. He played a key role in the theoretical understanding of electricity and magnetism. And he famously determined that the Earth could not be more than 100 million years old, challenging Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution required a considerably older Earth.

But Kelvin could not limit his scientific work to big issues. Practical questions engaged him, too. When the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable ran into transmission difficulties, he analyzed the problem theoretically, then invented a better receiver to solve it. He also developed a new compass that was adopted by the Royal Navy. The hyperkinetic Kelvin proved to be a good businessman. He patented these and other inventions, became a consultant to governments and corporations, jumping from project to project, and before he was 50, he was wealthy. Furthermore, his technological breakthroughs made him a darling of the popular press. After his death at age 83, one newspaper lauded him as “the greatest living scientist.” Lord Kelvin had one more honor coming. Almost 50 years after his death, a new temperature register, which starts at absolute zero, was named the Kelvin scale.

Today, few people have heard of Kelvin. How could this distinguished scientist — the Einstein of his day — slide so quickly into obscurity? In part, it was due to his intellectual isolation as an older man, out of touch with new scientific developments, one who wouldn’t accept that the Earth was far older than he estimated. A man, Lindley writes, “who said no to atoms, no to ... [the new] electromagnetic theory, no to radioactivity.”

To Lindley’s credit, he recognizes that Kelvin’s reputation declined for a more substantial reason. His brilliance enabled him to take on many projects, and his insights inspired other scientists in thermodynamics and electromagnetism. But Kelvin never stayed with anything long enough to wrap it up in a tidy package. “Kelvin thought so fast ...,” Lindley writes, “that he never stopped to think.”

This assessment seems a tad ungenerous. We don’t get a Newton or Einstein every generation. And though Kelvin may rank a notch below them in scientific thinking, his achievements were grand enough to justify a fascinating biography — and an eponymous temperature scale.
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