Thomson, Sir William first Baron Kelvin (1824–1907) Physicist and mathematician,
born in Belfast and educated at Glasgow, where he later became professor of natural philosophy, and at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His formulation of the second law of thermodynamics, predicting that the world would sooner or later suffer a heat death as a result of entropy, contributed significantly to late 19th‐century pessimism. The ignorance of this law displayed by most 20th‐century literary intellectuals was used as an illustration of the gap between the ... ...
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