DEGREES KELVIN:
A Tale of Genius, Invention,
and Tragedy.
By David Lindley. Joseph Henry Press. 366 pp. $27.95

Although no longer celebrated, William Thomson (1824–1907) was widely hailed in the 19th century as Britain’s greatest scientist. A mathematical prodigy, he published original work at the age of 16. He was knighted a half-century later as Lord Kelvin—the first British scientist elevated to the peerage—and at his death was buried in Westminster Abbey along­­side Isaac Newton.

The dust jacket predicts that Degrees Kelvin will become the “definitive biography” of this brilliant man. But David Lindley, the author of Boltzmann’s Atom (2001), reveals little about Thomson’s day-to-day existence and does not try to dramatize his personality. Of Thomson’s two marriages, the reader learns little more than that his depressive first wife wrote graveyard verse and that his second wife seems to have been cheery. Tellingly, Thomson left behind some 150 green notebooks full of scientific ideas and mathematical calculations—“but nothing personal,” reports Lindley. Likewise, Degrees Kelvin records not so much Thomson’s life as his thinking.

As Lindley impressively shows, however, Thomson thought incessantly and productively. A founder of thermodynamics—the study of the relationship between heat and work—he gave this fundamental science its name and established the existence of an absolute zero of temperature. (A thermometric calibration system based on absolute zero is called the Kelvin scale.) His purchase of a yacht, in 1870, meant not only boating pleasure but a new range of scientific questions to investigate, particularly the compass deviations caused by the ever-increasing amounts of iron used in ship construction. A technologist as much as a scientist, Thomson invented what was eventually adopted as the official compass of the Royal Navy. As a professor at Glasgow University—for 50 years—he coauthored the first undergraduate textbook on classical physics, which was also the first textbook to address such subjects as sound, light, heat, and magnetism as parts of a single discipline.

Lindley treats with lucid precision Thomson’s part in scientific debates and projects of the time. Thomson traded published charges and countercharges with geologists and biologists in the heated controversy over the age of the planet Earth. Active in the years-long international effort to establish transatlantic telegraph communications, he worked on a theory of the transmission of a pulse of electricity through an insulated underwater cable. During several visits to the United States he lectured, met Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, and was invited to head a commission to study the practicality of generating electricity from Niagara Falls.

Lindley thoughtfully evaluates the “tragedy”: Thomson’s decline into relative obscurity. He sees the scientist’s ever-active imagination as constrained by an unwillingness to take risky leaps. Living into a new era of physics that brought intimations of quantum theory and relativity, Thomson clung to his outdated view of a strictly mechanical universe, continued to maintain that the Earth was no more than a hundred million years old, refused to accept James Clark Maxwell’s universally recognized theory of electromagnetism, and expressed reservations about the existence of atoms. In growing intellectual isolation, this once-celebrated scientist became “something of a crank,” Lindley concludes, “a living fossil.”

—Kenneth Silverman