¹ Though Smith and Wise co-authored Kelvin, they inform us in their Preface that most of the chapters were written by one or the other of them. This chapter is the first in Part II, for which Wise had primary responsibility. However, it seems quite apparent that the two authors strongly influenced one another's writing so that I will make no attempt to distinguish between them.

² The following passage, which illustrates this carrying of a principle to every level, appears in the midst of a discussion of the proper units for dynamics: ‘Thomson's rifle-corps patriotism and anti-Catholicism expressed his notion of universality in the same way. He sought national unity in the unionist sense, meaning the union of Ireland with the rest of Britain under one set of standards and laws (chs. 1, 23). Catholicism, within his ideology, represented at once the tyranny of sects, parties, superstition, and authority. With less venom, but similar ideas, he attacked all other particularist impediments to national unity. Cambridge “mathematicians” came under the same barrage’ (p. 357).

³ So, for example, at one important juncture the authors remark ‘this incredibly cryptic paper of a mere three pages makes no reference to work, vis viva, mechanical effect or least action, and supplies no aids to understanding other than the concluding remark’ (p. 271). But from it they conclude that for Thomson ‘The equilibrium state of the system is thus to be understood in essentially temporal terms, the terms of genesis and further development in a natural succession of states’–thereby providing a hook to progression, and through it to theology. It seems to me that this chain of reasoning requires more direct evidence than the ‘cryptic three pages’, though one might argue that the evidence of a common pattern in his work is compelling (on the fractal model). If we accept the argument then Faraday's influence must be rethought, because according to Smith, and Wise, ‘In the process [of Thomson's working through his novel understanding]Google Scholar Faraday's theory had acquired a power far beyond that of the descriptive lines of force, but the mathematical theory too had become a much more powerful, and quite different tool: it had become field theory’ (p. 275). Thomson it seems did not ‘mathematize Faraday’ in any meaningful sense; he created mathematical field theory.

⁴ Though the connection to the minimum energy condition in field theory seems to be rather through ‘the practical engineering principle that powered the ships and mills of Glasgow’ (p. 248) than through global concepts of progression in nature and society.

⁵ Another, related feature that had tremendous contemporary influence, and which they do remark but do not spend much time on here (e.g. p. 386), is the thoroughgoing macroscopic character of the Treatise. Not only are there no mass points, but the Treatise's energy-based analysis of elasticity (which, ananlytically at least, does not go much beyond George Green) is grounded in the continuum.

⁶ See also the remarks in Chapter 18, pp. 621–33, concerning Thomson and Maxwell's demon, where it is argued that Thomson could not accept the possibility of any violation of the second law, local or otherwise. The argument here seems to be that Maxwell's demon depended upon cutting matter up into discrete particles. Thomson insisted that the particles would have to be vortices in the liquid continuum, in which case they could not be ‘isolated’ from one another because each is perpetually interacting with every other one.

⁷ On Stokes's view underwater telegraphy was apparently a process of interrupted electrostatic charging, whereas on Thomson's view it was a case of the interrupted transmission of electric current. So, for Stokes, the problem of signal retardation that stimulated the correspondence had, I suppose, to do with delays in charging up this immense jar; for Thomson, it had to do with delays in detecting changes in current magnitude.

⁸ Though perhaps it would be wrong to say that Kirchhoff did create the same equation as Thomson, considering how very different their understandings of electric quantities and measurements were. A signal virtue of Kelvin is that it tends frequently to destabilize associations that one had long thought were firmly rooted.

⁹ In an influential piece of work Thomson was able a few years later successfully to apply an old concept (that of anisotropic inertia) to generate for the first time a thoroughly consistent structure for wave optics, though this was quite widely appreciated at the time (and immediately reinterpreted in electromagnetic terms).

¹⁰ Though I do not think that the declaration, made here as well as earlier in Kelvin, for his having been profoundly disturbed by a conflict between Chalmers's and Nichol's views – loosely, between providence (dissipation) and fixed natural law (conservation) – has been thoroughly established, nor could it be without more concrete evidence that the authors have uncovered. Further, the assertion made in Chapter 4, that ‘The conflict over conservation and progression had become the issue that marked a new epoch’ (p. 99), though suggestive, requires sinuous argument for William to transform it into something useful for understanding the origins of his thermodynamics. From a wider perspective than the Thomsons', it appears that the authors are asserting the prevalent influence of a worldview seated in a conflict between degenerative change and divine preservation, something requiring ‘new answers… in natural philosophy, just as in geology and biology’. These are difficult claims to support in a thoroughly compelling way without a great deal of evidence and connecting tissue, though Smith and Wise's arguments are certainly forceful.

¹¹ I do not mean this either disparagingly or in jest. The kind of argument that Smith and Wise make, which involves reproducing a pattern at multiple levels, must be long by necessity, else it would not be replicative.