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Introduction

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Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth

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Abstract

Early in 1869, some nine years after his now legendary encounter with Bishop Wilberforce, Thomas Henry Huxley found himself again the advocate for a beleaguered scientific theory. His task was to defend uniformitarian geology against the charge “that a great mistake has been made—that British popular geology at the present time is in direct opposition to the principles of Natural Philosophy.”1 This time, however, Huxley’s opponent was not the shallowly eloquent bishop whose scientific expertise had long since ended with an undergraduate first in mathematics. This time his opponent was William Thomson (1824–1907), a scientist of international reputation who, at age forty-four, was at the height of his powers. And this time the outcome was to be quite different.

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References

  1. Kelvin (1871a), Geological Time, p. 44

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  2. William Thomson was not raised to the peerage as Baron Kelvin until 1892. In fact, he was yet to be knighted when he began his attack on uniformitarian geology although his scientific reputation was already well established. He is best known today, however, as Lord Kelvin, and so I have chosen to refer to him as “Kelvin” throughout this work except in direct quotations or where ambiguity might arise. The standard account of his life is still Thompson, S. P. (1910), Kelvin.

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  3. Kelvin (1871a), Geological Time, p. 10.

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  6. Ibid., p. 427.

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  10. Much of the material included in this brief introductory background sketch is based upon the work of Haber and that of Toulmin and Goodfield. I am also indebted to L. Eiseley (1961), Darwin’s Century;

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  11. J. C. Greene (1961), Death of Adam;

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  14. G. L. Davies (1969), Earth in Decay; and numerous papers by M.J.S. Rudwick and L. G. Wilson. Frequently the information that I have tried to compress into a few paragraphs cannot be attributed to a single source, and certainly none of the authors cited can be blamed for any oversimplifications that may have resulted.

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  28. Ibid., p. 304.

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  29. The best account of Hutton’s ideas is still to be found in Playfair (1802), Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory.

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  37. Such a view appears to me untenable. Certainly there were Neptunists, particularly in Britain, whose religion was stronger than their science, but their occasional foibles hardly nullify the mass of careful observation undertaken in the cause of the Deluge and in the cause of science. Wilson gives what seems to me a more balanced view of the Neptunists as scientists (Wilson, L. G. (1966), Origins of Charles Lyell’s Uniformitarianism).

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  46. Ibid., pp. 288–304; Rudwick (1970), Strategy of Lyell’s Principles, pp. 5–33;

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Authors
  1. Joe D. Burchfield
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© 1975 Science History Publications

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Burchfield, J.D. (1975). Introduction. In: Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02565-7_1

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