In 1884 Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) delivered a significant series of lectures on physics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. This book presents the twenty lectures in their original form for the first time.

Victorian physics meets industrial capitalism Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9554-0 Authors Bruce J. Hunt, History Department, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station B7000, Austin, TX 78712-0220, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

G. G. Stokes and Lord Kelvin helped bring about conceptual and institutional changes that transformed the science of physics. Indeed, they and their Victorian colleagues constituted one of the most significant groups of scientists in the whole history of science. This collection of letters was first published in 1990, and provides, therefore, invaluable insight and information for a period of major historical importance. Stokes and Kelvin corresponded for over fifty years as professors in Cambridge and Glasgow, respectively, (...) thus amassing what is easily the largest extant correspondence between two Victorian physicists. The letters range widely over the people, ideas, and institutions of the age. They illuminate the histories of Cambridge and Glasgow Universities and the Royal Society of London, for example, as well as developments in electromagnetism, hydrodynamics, elasticity, optics, and X-rays. The editor's introduction describes the context of the pair's careers, while guiding the reader into their correspondence. (shrink)

Challenged by Lord Kelvin's claims that earth and sun were too young to give evolution sufficient time to do its work, especially in the human case, where care for the weak blunts the edge of natural selection, Darwin leaned on Lamarckian thoughts to accelerate the process. The mental and moral traits crowning human distinctiveness, he urged, arose through sexual selection. But promiscuity, infanticide, early betrothals, and female drudgery undermined these effects in “savage races.” In the inevitable decline and (...) ultimate extinction of the “melanin races” Darwin believed he could observe human evolution underway before his eyes. (shrink)

William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, played a major role in the nineteenth century in changing scientific theory from the statical view, associated with imponderables, to the dynamical view which conceived of energy as a separate and convertible entity. Thomson's conversion from the statical to the dynamical view of nature was due to the influence of experimentalists, Michael Faraday and James Prescott Joule. It was Thomson's use of mathematical metaphor that enabled him to interpret on a theoretical level the (...) physical explanation given by Faraday and Joule. (shrink)

I think that to Lord Kelvin is attributed the saying that the scientific attitude to a thing, if you can't do anything else with it, is to measure it. This is the attitude I propose to adopt towards Time . The situation is to some extent analogous to the situation with regard to electricity . Science is unable to say what electricity is, and so it almost denies the word any entrance into a treatise on the subject. It (...) replaces it by the word charge , which is something that can be measured. It is important to avoid hypostatizing time into a thing-in-itself. Instead of trying to say what time is we try to find a way of measuring it. (shrink)

Is science getting at the truth? The sceptics – those who spread doubt about science – often employ a simple argument: scientists were sure in the past, and then they ended up being wrong. Such sceptics draw on dramatic quotes from eminent scientists such as Lord Kelvin, who reportedly stated at the turn of the 20th century “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now,” shortly before physics was dramatically transformed. They ask: given the history of (...) science, wouldn’t it be naïve to think that current scientific theories reveal ‘the truth’, and will never be discarded in favour of other theories? Through a combination of historical investigation and philosophical-sociological analysis, Identifying Future-Proof Science defends science against such potentially dangerous scepticism. It is argued that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever, so long as science continues. How do we identify future-proof claims? This appears to be a new question for science scholars, and not an unimportant one. It is argued that the best way to identify future-proof science is to avoid any attempt to analyse the relevant first-order scientific evidence, instead focusing purely on second-order evidence. Specifically, a scientific claim is future-proof when the relevant scientific community is large, international, and diverse, and at least 95% of that community would describe the claim as a ‘scientific fact’. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity. (shrink)

With the progress of science we become more and more aware of the undiscovered, and of our feebleness to visualize or express what is dimly known to us. Geologists estimate that man evolved some 1,000,000 years ago on an earth which astronomers say is some 2,000,000,000 years old. Caution is required in accepting such figures, for we must remember how far out Lord Kelvin was in estimating the age of the earth—before the discovery of radium. Man has been (...) civilized for some 5,000 years, and Galileo, with his telescope and revolutionary ideas, lived some 300 years ago. There may be, we are told, a million million years before the sun grows weak and the earth becomes farther from the sun so that all life freezes. Long before this man may use up the metals available for his machines, and those ready sources of energy now so wastefully used, by which he at present multiplies and swarms in cities. In such case he will return through birth control or famine, or both, to a simple, uncrowded, pastoral existence. There is little likelihood of his being able to use atomic energy, other than that which reaches the earth as sun radiation and is available directly or as energy stored in water-power, wood, coal, and oil. (shrink)

With the progress of science we become more and more aware of the undiscovered, and of our feebleness to visualize or express what is dimly known to us. Geologists estimate that man evolved some 1,000,000 years ago on an earth which astronomers say is some 2,000,000,000 years old. Caution is required in accepting such figures, for we must remember how far out Lord Kelvin was in estimating the age of the earth—before the discovery of radium. Man has been (...) civilized for some 5,000 years, and Galileo, with his telescope and revolutionary ideas, lived some 300 years ago. There may be, we are told, a million million years before the sun grows weak and the earth becomes farther from the sun so that all life freezes. Long before this man may use up the metals available for his machines, and those ready sources of energy now so wastefully used, by which he at present multiplies and swarms in cities. In such case he will return through birth control or famine, or both, to a simple, uncrowded, pastoral existence. There is little likelihood of his being able to use atomic energy, other than that which reaches the earth as sun radiation and is available directly or as energy stored in water-power, wood, coal, and oil. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe societal context within which science is pursued generally acts as a productive force in the generation of knowledge. To analyze this action it is helpful to consider particular modes of mediation through which societal concerns are projected into the very local and esoteric concerns of a particular domain of research. One such mode of mediation occurs through material systems. Here I treat two such systems – the steam engine and the electric telegraph – in the natural philosophy of (...) William Thomson (Lord Kelvin).The steam engine illustratesconceptualmediation. It simultaneously instantiates “labor value” in political economy and “work” in engineering mechanics, thereby identifying the two concepts in the region of their common reference. The partial identification carries with it a structural analogy between a network of concepts from political economy and a similar network in natural philosophy, providing a potent heuristic for the reformulation and further development of dynamics.The electric telegraph illustratesmethodologicalmediation. It projects the interests of engineering and industry into the interests of electromagnetic theory and vice versa, thereby establishing, in Thomson's view, a Baconian unity of truth and utility. As the common reference of theory and practice, the telegraph locates the truth of theoretical knowledge in its utility and the utility of practical knowledge in its truth.These particular cases of conceptual and methodological mediation indicate how the local practices, concepts, and interests of a research specialty, or subculture, draw on and are adapted to those of the larger culture within which they develop. Thus the analysis of mediation leads to an ecological model of the social construction of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This volume is the latest in a series of books and articles stretching back more than three decades on a theme quite startling in its claims and implications: that terrestrial life did not originate on Earth but arrived in the form of cells or bacteria from outer space. The idea of “panspermia,” that the seeds of life are spread from planet to planet, dates to the 19th century with the ideas of Lord Kelvin. It was championed by the (...) Swedish physicist, chemist, and Nobelist Svante Arrhenius at the beginning of the 20th century. Once scientists recognized the difficulties of life surviving in the conditions of interplanetary and interstellar space, by the 1960s a neo-panspermia became popular: not life itself, but prebiotic chemicals were the new seeds of life, made more likely by the discovery of numerous complex organic molecules in meteorites, comets, and interstellar molecular clouds. But the difficulties of synthesizing anything more complicated than amino acids in the wake of the famous Miller-Urey experiment in 1953 kept alive the idea that life itself may be spread throughout the universe. At the center of this work is Chandra Wickramasinghe, a research student of the maverick astronomer Fred Hoyle. In 1962 Hoyle became interested in the origin and nature of interstellar dust, in particular as found in dense molecular clouds, and he and Wickramasinghe set to work on the problem. They became convinced that dust could not form inside molecular clouds, but must have originated in the atmospheres of cool stars, protoplanetary discs, or supernova ejecta, a theory now widely accepted. It was the next steps that became increasingly controversial: that the spectroscopic signature of dust was best explained by complex biomolecules such as cellulose; that biomolecules were assembled into still more complex forms inside comets; and that the living cells and bacteria generated there were responsible for the origin of life on Earth. And not only that: Hoyle and Wickramasinghe argued that the delivery of bacteria from space continues, affecting both the origin and the ongoing evolution of life, and may even be responsible for certain diseases on Earth. These theories were not only reported in reputable scientific journals such as Nature, but also in popular books including Lifecloud (1978), Diseases from Space (1979), and Evolution from Space (1981). Biologists were not impressed; Lynn Margulis, not known for the timidity of her own theories such as endosymbiosis, called the first book “wanton, amusing, promiscuous fiction.”. (shrink)

Poreskoro, with three cat and four dog heads and a snake with a forked tongue as his tail, is responsible for epidemics of contagious diseases in Romany folklore. The Pishachas of Vedic mythology lurk in charnel houses and graveyards, waiting for humans to infect with madness. In Christian demonology, Pythius is known as the ruler of the eighth circle of the Inferno, bestowing heinous and unspeakable tortures on those who have committed fraud. Demons are the stuff of legends, and they (...) are everywhere in mythology and theology. These are just three of the more than thirty I counted that start with the letter P.How lucky we are for the advent of science. A rational tonic, it scatters our demons, demystifying the world for us—or so, at least, we think. As Canales brilliantly shows in this book, our assumption has been far off the mark. In physics, computer science, genetics, neuroscience, and economics, not to mention in the very foundations of rationality itself, an underworld of imaginary creatures has sustained and continues to inhabit modern science. Scientific demons appear in many guises: as atomic and subatomic particle manipulators, as feedback and parallel-processing experts, as messengers who can travel faster than the speed of light, as computer-code spies, gene and bit selectors in evolution and in informatics, as triggers of cascades from the nano level to the level of full-blown ecological and astrophysical theaters. By inventing them, we have learned that causality does not always hold at the level of atoms, that the speed of message transmission is limited, that living systems spend energy, that perpetual-motion machines are impossible, and that there are corners of the universe we have not imagined.We have all heard of Laplace's Demon, and Maxwell's, but who knew that, borrowing from physics, the historian Henry Adams considered the action of demons in geopolitics or that the economist Paul Samuelson analyzed their role in producing more efficient markets? Who knew that the generation that gave us the Internet and artificial intelligence were tasked by their teachers in graduate school to insert as many demons as possible into their programs? Who among us has heard of Darwin's Demon, or Maxwell-Szilárd-Brillouin's, or Monod's, or Loschmidt's? Who is aware of Norbert Weiner's use of demons in conceptualizing cybernetics, or of the great scholar of Kabbalah Gershom Scholem's comparison between Israel's superfast computers and the Golem?As Canales shows convincingly, it has been difficult for both historians and scientists to countenance demons in science, and so they have been written out, in many ways and many instances, of the histories of which they are part and parcel. Thomas Kuhn and even the more radical philosopher Paul Feyerabend both failed to acknowledge in their social critiques of science the extent to which an imaginary underworld of beings has been constitutive of the modern scientific imagination. Ironically, it was the man who provided a hard-and-fast criterion by which to distinguish scientific and nonscientific pursuits, Karl Popper, who ultimately saw the light. Revisiting his classic book The Logic of Scientific Discovery from 1934, he clarified in Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1982 the extent to which every historical era has been characterized by a particular demon. We moderns believe that science is about facts and numbers, but we are mistaken. As Canales beautifully summarizes the stakes of her project, “What first sets science on its path of discovery—then as now—is the continued use of the imagination.”Tracking the fate of demons in modern thought from Descartes to Lord Kelvin to H. G. Wells to David Bohm, and from Conrad Hal Waddington to Henry Compton to Stephen Hawking and Steven Pinker, Bedeviled assumes that the demons of the church or of paganism and the demons of science differ and resemble each other in ways that can be usefully elaborated. What is more crucial, however, is how such demons become real, how they morph from fears to hopes, and from thought experiments into real experiments, and ultimately to things in this world like computer programs, transistors, and nanorobots. From weather systems to messenger RNAs to black holes, demons emerge everywhere. The hard question is: How does the imagination actually drive discovery and understanding? How does it change our world?Perhaps it has been a sidetrack to consider whether we have or have never been modern. Clearly, what reason will not allow, it perennially recruits for a shadowland that helps us to better see our world. Rather than aiming to exorcise science, one day, of all of its methodological and epistemological ghosts, perhaps we might make peace with the notion that every culture struggles with distinguishing truth from falsehood in its own unique way. Such struggles are sensitive to their times and are accomplished through leaps of imagination. But fear not: the debunking of “Western rationality” casts no wet blanket on the project of Enlightenment. If anything, as Canales writes, “an account of science that considers how scientists themselves do science only risks adding new insights into our repertoire of knowledge.” Perhaps, therefore, there is solace to be gained from the dictum, Always choose the Devil you know. Ultimately, there may be no other way forward. (shrink)

The three demi-articles presented here would give a brief biographical account of Ludwig Boltzmann’s life plus some details about his Vienna laboratories first in the 1860’s in the Erdberg and second in Türkenstrasse from 1894. Josef Nabl’s account discusses J. J. Thomson’s Laboratory in Cambridge, which allows a provisional comparison between two different largely contemporary institutes. Nabl’s second letter also mentions Lord Kelvin’s late rejection of the kinetic gas theory of Maxwell and Boltzmann, rejection which on top of (...) the negative attitude of Mach, Zermelo, and Poincaré probably did not benefit Boltzmann’s state of mind and may have contributed to the extreme character of Boltzmann’s anti-philosophical counterattack starting in 1903. (shrink)

The principle of mass additivity states that the mass of a composite object is the sum of the masses of its elementary components. Mass additivity is true in Newtonian mechanics but false in special relativity. Physicists have explained why mass additivity is true in Newtonian mechanics by reducing it to Newton’s microphysical laws. This reductive explanation does not fit well with deducibility theories of reductive explanation such as the modern Nagelian theory of reduction, and the a priori entailment theory of (...) reduction that is prominent in the philosophy of mind. Nonetheless, I argue that a reconstruction of the explanation that incorporates distinctively philosophical concepts in fact fits both theories. I discuss the implications of this result for both theories and for the reductive explanation of consciousness. (shrink)

The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (MWI) states that the world we live in is just one among many parallel worlds. It is widely believed that because of this commitment to parallel worlds, the MWI violates common sense. Some go so far as to reject the MWI on this basis. This is despite its myriad of advantages to physics (e.g. consistency with relativity theory, mathematical simplicity, realism, determinism, etc.). Here, we make the case that common sense in fact favors (...) the MWI. We argue that causal explanations are commonsensical only when they are local causal explanations. We present several quantum mechanical experiments that seem to exhibit nonlocal “action at a distance”. Under the assumption that only one world exists, these experiments seem immune to local causal explanation. However, we show that the MWI, by taking all worlds together, can provide local causal explanations of the experiments. The MWI therefore restores common sense to physical explanation. (shrink)

Integrated information theory is a theory of consciousness that was originally formulated, and is standardly still expressed, in terms of controversial interpretations of its own ontological and epistemological basis. These form the orthodox interpretation of IIT. The orthodox epistemological interpretation is the axiomatic method, whereby IIT is ultimately derived from, justified by, and beholden to a set of phenomenological axioms. The orthodox ontological interpretation is panpsychism, according to which consciousness is fundamental, intrinsic, and pervasive. In this paper it is argued (...) that both components of the orthodox interpretation should be rejected. But IIT should not be rejected since an interpretation-neutral formulation is available. After explaining the neutral formulation, more plausible non-axiomatic epistemologies are defended. The neutral formulation is then shown to be consistent with various contemporary physicalist ontologies of consciousness, including the phenomenal concept strategy, representationalism, and even illusionism. Along the way, instructive connections between interpretations of IIT and interpretations of quantum mechanics are noted. (shrink)

Errol Lord offers a new account of the nature of rationality: what it is for one to be rational is to correctly respond to the normative reasons one possesses. Lord defends novel views about what it is to possess reasons and what it is to correctly respond to reasons, and dispels doubts about whether we ought to be rational.

We defend the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics against the objection that it cannot explain why measurement outcomes are predicted by the Born probability rule. We understand quantum probabilities in terms of an observer's self-location probabilities. We formulate a probability postulate for the MWI: the probability of self-location in a world with a given set of outcomes is the absolute square of that world's amplitude. We provide a proof of this postulate, which assumes the quantum formalism and two principles concerning (...) symmetry and locality. We also show how a structurally similar proof of the Born rule is available for collapse theories. We conclude by comparing our account to the recent account offered by Sebens and Carroll. (shrink)

Aristotle is the most influential philosopher of practice, and Knight's new book explores the continuing importance of Aristotelian philosophy. First, it examines the theoretical bases of what Aristotle said about ethical, political and productive activity. It then traces ideas of practice through such figures as St Paul, Luther, Hegel, Heidegger and recent Aristotelian philosophers, and evaluates Alasdair MacIntyre's contribution. Knight argues that, whereas Aristotle's own thought legitimated oppression, MacIntyre's revision of Aristotelianism separates ethical excellence from social elitism and justifies resistance. (...) With MacIntyre, Aristotelianism becomes revolutionary. MacIntyre's case for the Thomistic Aristotelian tradition originates in his attempt to elaborate a Marxist ethics informed by analytic philosophy. He analyses social practices in teleological terms, opposing them to capitalist institutions and arguing for the cooperative defence of our moral agency. In condensing these ideas, Knight advances a theoretical argument for the reformation of Aristotelianism and an ethical argument for social change. (shrink)

The primary quantum mechanical equation of motion entails that measurements typically do not have determinate outcomes, but result in superpositions of all possible outcomes. Dynamical collapse theories (e.g. GRW) supplement this equation with a stochastic Gaussian collapse function, intended to collapse the superposition of outcomes into one outcome. But the Gaussian collapses are imperfect in a way that leaves the superpositions intact. This is the tails problem. There are several ways of making this problem more precise. But many authors dismiss (...) the problem without considering the more severe formulations. Here I distinguish four distinct tails problems. The first (bare tails problem) and second (structured tails problem) exist in the literature. I argue that while the first is a pseudo-problem, the second has not been adequately addressed. The third (multiverse tails problem) reformulates the second to account for recently discovered dynamical consequences of collapse. Finally the fourth (tails problem dilemma) shows that solving the third by replacing the Gaussian with a non-Gaussian collapse function introduces new conflict with relativity theory. (shrink)

Thomson, Kelvin You might be surprised to learn that China, home of the much derided one-child policy, has a higher birth rate than Italy, home of the Vatican. This suggests Chinese families are quietly defying their political leaders and Italian families are quietly defying their religious ones. But the overall global picture is one of rapid population growth.

Errol Lord explores the boundaries of epistemic normativity. He argues that we can understand these better by thinking about which mental states are competitors in rationality’s competition. He argues that belief, disbelief, and two kinds of suspension of judgment are competitors. Lord shows that there are non-evidential reasons for suspension of judgment. One upshot is an independent motivation for a certain sort of pragmatist view of epistemic rationality.

Various tests have been proposed as helps to identify intrinsic properties. This paper compares three prominent tests and shows that they fail to pass adequate verdicts on a set of three properties. The paper examines whether improved versions of the tests can reduce or remove these negative outcomes. We reach the sceptical conclusion that whereas some of the tests must be discarded as inadequate because they don’t yield definite results, the remaining tests depend for their application on the details of (...) fundamental particle physics so much so that they cannot be relied upon. (shrink)

This paper begins with the observation that the contemporary eco-building movement in the UK focuses on technology with the principal aim of reducing carbon emissions and so combating climate change. While this focus may translate into justice for future generations, there seems markedly less regard for justice for others in intragenerational space. I analyse the eco-building movement's framings of sustainable development and sustainability, seeking out statements of equity via the criteria used for building materials selection. Closely defining equity as theory (...) and practice, analysis reveals that framings of sustainable development and sustainability in the eco-building movement vary considerably in their engagement with intragenerational equity. This begs the question of whether the movement has a shared political critique. There is a marked tendency to view discourses of environmental sustainability and social justice as distinct rather than mutually constitutive. I propose that the eco-building movement should engage in a politics of the common good (Sandel, 2010), contesting equity in the public domain. Wary of the reach of markets, the eco-building movement should debate not only the right way to distribute building materials and shelter but also the right way to value them. (shrink)

What makes some firms more innovative than others and what determines the source of these innovations are questions that are still not adequately answered due to the complex, often esoteric, nature of the innovation process. This paper considers the effect of one externally oriented strategy (extent of formal inter-organizational linkages) and one internally oriented strategy (degree of knowledge intensity) on overall levels of innovativeness and the source of these innovations. Using data collected from firms operating in the bioscience-technology industries in (...) both New York and Utah, our results suggest that both of these strategies have a significant effect upon innovation levels and the source of innovation (internally versus externally stimulated). Interestingly, there were few firms that undertook both of these strategies simultaneously and thus the proposed interaction effect where increased absorptive capacity (on the basis of knowledge intensity) would make external linkages even more valuable could not be discerned. (shrink)

Philosophical tradition has been challenged by those who would have us look to our own practice, and to nothing beyond. In this, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger is followed by the politics of Hannah Arendt, for whom the tradition of political philosophy terminated with Karl Marx’s theorization of labour. This challenge has been met by Alasdair MacIntyre, for whom the young Marx’s reconceptualization of production as a social activity can inform an Aristotelianism that addresses our shared practices in traditional, teleological (...) terms. Looking to the social nature of our practices orientates us to common goods, to the place of those goods in our own lives, and to their place within political communities. MacIntyre’s Thomistic Aristotelian tradition has Heideggerian and other philosophical rivals, but he argues that it represents our best way of theorizing practice. (shrink)

Under what conditions are material objects, such as particles, parts of a whole object? This is the composition question and is a longstanding open question in philosophy. Existing attempts to specify a non-trivial restriction on composition tend to be vague and face serious counterexamples. Consequently, two extreme answers have become mainstream: composition (the forming of a whole by its parts) happens under no or all conditions. In this paper, we provide a self-contained introduction to the integrated information theory of consciousness (...) (IIT). We show that IIT specifies a non-trivial restriction on composition: composition happens when integrated information is maximized. We compare the IIT-restriction to existing proposals and argue that the IIT-restriction has significant advantages, especially in response to the problems of vagueness and counterexamples. An appendix provides an introduction to calculating parts and wholes with a simple system. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre is an Aristotelian critic of communitarianism, which he understands to be committed to the politics of the capitalist and bureaucratic nation-state. The politics he proposes instead is based in the resistance to managerial institutions of what he calls ‘practices’, because these are schools of virtue. This shares little with the communitarianism of a Taylor or the Aristotelianism of a Gadamer. Although practices require formal institutions. MacIntyre opposes such conservative politics. Conventional accounts of a ‘liberal-communitarian debate’ in political philosophy (...) face the dilemma that Alasdair MacIntyre, often identified as a paradigmatic communitarian, has consistently and emphatically repudiated this characterization. Although neo-Aristotelianism is sometimes seen as a philosophical warrant for communitarian politics, MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism is opposed to communitarianism. This paper explores the rationale of that opposition. (shrink)

In [1] it is claimed that, based on radiation emission measurements described in [2], a certain “variant” of the Orch OR theory has been refuted. I agree with this claim. However, the significance of this result for Orch OR per se is unclear. After all, the refuted “variant” was never advocated by anyone, and it contradicts the views of Hameroff and Penrose (hereafter: HP) who invented Orch OR [3]. My aim is to get clear on this situation. I argue that (...) it is indeed reasonable to speak of “variants” here. Orch OR is not a complete model of reality but a work in progress. At its core, it claims that wavefunction collapse is a real physical event that has something to do with gravity (“OR”) and that consciousness depends on orchestrated collapses in microtubules (“Orch”). There are many ways one could make these base ideas precise hence many “variants”. Furthermore, the ways that HP aim to make these ideas precise are radical and incomplete. If they don’t work out, Orch OR will need to fall back on another variant. Thus, I believe the significance of [1-2] for Orch OR is that it cuts out a small class of possible variants and leaves behind questions and challenges for the rest, including the variant preferred by HP. (shrink)