Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) - Child Prodigy; Brilliant Scientist/Engineer

Scotland has produced many great scientists/inventors - well above her fair share.  William Thomson stands out among these great heroes of science; for me it was delightful to discuss his life and work in my lecture series on Great Scottish Inventors at Strathclyde University in the summer of 2014.

In the following, I post the slides from the two-hour lecture on Lord Kelvin. A child prodigy, Lord Kelvin maintained a dominant position as a leading scientist during most of the second half of the nineteenth century.  Unable to come to terms with discoveries about the atomic nature of matter, his opposition to Darwin's theory and also his inability to accept Rutherford's theory of radioactivity put Kelvin on the losing side of many arguments in the latter part of his career.  But this does not diminish his brilliant contributions to thermodynamics and the far reaching influence of many of his engineering achievements.

(Click on the slide to view bigger image)