Lord Kelvin

Lord Kelvin, born William Thomson, was professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow for fifty-three years, from the age of twenty-two, and the dominant physicist of Victorian Britain: he formulated the second law of thermodynamics, established the absolute temperature scale that bears his name, made the Atlantic telegraph cable work, and was the first scientist raised to the peerage. The Wave Theory of Light, a lecture of 1884, is his account of Huygens’s theory as the nineteenth century developed it. He also calculated, wrongly, that the earth was too young for Darwin’s evolution.