Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin

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Cambridge University Press, Oct 26, 1989 - Biography & Autobiography - 866 pages
This study of Lord Kelvin, the most famous mathematical physicist of 19th-century Britain, delivers on a speculation long entertained by historians of science that Victorian physics expressed in its very content the industrial society that produced it.

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Contents

While professor of mathematics at this radical latitudinarian institution
10
Clydeside
27
Dr Thomsons family
49
A Cambridge undergraduate
57
The changing tradition of natural philosophy
87
A changing context for both natural and social philosophy in the 1830s
99
89
116
The language of mathematical physics
163
Thomson versus Maxwell
445
The irreversible cosmos
497
The age of the sun controversies
524
The secular cooling of the earth
552
The age of the earth controversies
579
The habitation of earth
612
During the 1830s the reformers recaptured traditional British emphases
639
The telegraphic art
649

The kinematics of field theory and the nature of electricity
203
Opposing styles and a skewed reception
225
work ponderomotive force and extremum
237
the years of uncertainty
282
the years of resolution
317
TT or Treatise on Natural Philosophy
348
The hydrodynamics of matter
396
the economics of electricity
684
the art of navigation
723
The magnetic compass
754
Baron Kelvin of Largs
799
Bibliography
815
Index
838
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