Kelvin - Life, Labours and Legacy - R. Flood, et - Samples of art and ...

PREFACE
The year 2007 sees the centenary of William Thomson’s death. On 23 of December
1907, with all the pomp that the British Empire could muster, William Thomson,
Baron Kelvin of Largs was buried in Westminster Abbey beside the nation’s most
venerated scientist, Sir Isaac Newton. In his lifetime Thomson was seen as the most
important natural philosopher of the Victorian age, but the waxing and waning
of the twentieth century and the supplanting of classical physics have eroded his
reputation, so that for many scientists he is remembered as little more than a unit
of temperature.
This book of collected essays seeks to re-evaluate and rehabilitate Lord Kelvin, setting
both the man and his work in historical and scientific context. It is not of course the
first book to do so, and the debt to previous scholarship, and in particular to the thorough
and encyclopaedic scholarship of Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise in their Energy
and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin, published by Cambridge University Press
in 1989, is acknowledged by many of the authors in this volume.
The current work is distinctive in bringing the expertise of a range of authors,
historians of science and of mathematics, physicists, mathematicians and engineers,
to bear on Kelvin’s life, labours, and legacy. This range of contributors in itself testifies
to the extent of Kelvin’s work, and it is hoped that it will also enable the reader
to view the subject from a variety of perspectives, each of which complements and
enriches the others. Each essay is self contained and can be read independently of
the others. This has inevitably introduced some examples of repetition across the
book, but as editors we feel this small price is worth paying, as it allows readers to
move directly to the aspects of Kelvin’s life and work which interest them most. Of
course we hope that such a reader, their appetite thus whetted, will be led to many
of the other essays!
We would like to thank the authors, who have each brought their distinctive
enthusiasm for Kelvin to their contribution, and have graciously submitted to our
editorial requests. We are also grateful that many of them have taken great pains in
providing suitable illustrations for their contributions.
Raymond Flood
Mark McCartney
Andrew Whitaker
April 2007