Lord Kelvin

In the last post I said we need to keep up with information such as that from the Paleoanthropology Society and Society for American Archaeology meeting in Montreal, Marach 30-April 4. Here is another item from this meeting which can be found here, Science News v. 165, 4/17/04, p. 254.

Degrees Kelvin: A tale of Genius, invention, and Tragedy might be an interesting biography about William Thomson, who became Lord Kelvin. He "published his first technical paper on heat flow" when only 16 years old.

Kelvin "made major findings in thermodynamics and electromagnetism" and "among his accomplishments are the perfecting of transatlantic telegraphy and the invention of a compass that operated even on the new steel-sided ships" and also "was elevated to the British peerage...the first scientist so honored."

Best of all, of course, he "opposed the doctrines of evolution" -- of course, in this book, that's supposed to be a BAD thing, something perhaps due to his age, "when his demeanor became cantankerous and he began to espouse some unpopular and embarrassing views. For instance, he expressed reservations about the existence of atoms..."

I don't know what his exact views on atoms were, but our view of them is not the same as it was then. One of his big arguments against evolution was that his famous thermodynamic calculations revealed that Earth's interior should be cooled solid if it were as old as the evolutionists said.

I believe when reading a review of this book in, Nature, that I pointed out that the author forgot that the evolutionists of the time had no good response to this, but just believed on faith that something had kept the Earth's interior hot and molten all that time.

Later, the discovery of radioactive materials was said to solve the problem -- that's what I was taught. But I recently read in a Nature article that Earth's heat is still in excess of what radioactive materials can account for.

At any rate, it shows the philosophical, emotional, and spiritual committment that evolutionists have had from the start, when someone of Kelvin's stature could show mathematically that there couldn't have been enough time for evolution, and yet the evolutionary movement continued to grow without a hitch.


Until Next Time,
David Bump