Energy; Review/Essay of

THE SCIENCE OF ENERGY:

A Cultural History of Energy Physics
in Victorian Britain
by Crosbie Smith (1998)
© H. J. Spencer [21Jun.2021] 12,000 words (18 pages).
ABSTRACT
In this 400-page award-winning book, Smith describes the human side of one of the major concepts in recent
times: Energy. This is a word that appears often in today's conversations but most people have only vaguest
sense of this idea. Smith is a historian of science, who is fascinated by the personalities involved but he is also
very familiar with the science of energy, so he can present both sides of this intriguing story: a powerful new
concept and the tough men who created it; mainly from the North of England and Scotland. These scientists and
engineers developed energy physics to solve practical problems encountered by Scottish shipbuilders and
marine engineers; to counter biblical revivalism and evolutionary materialism; and to rapidly enhance their own
scientific credibility and, in the case of Maxwell, promote his own secret religious agenda. This was one of the
first examples of unifying physics, when most scientists were stuck in just specialities. It was only in 1853 that
the formal Energy definition surfaced but the discoveries of atomic physics ended its conquest as the atomic
world was seen to be discrete that contradicted the original continuum assumption. Smith skillfully places this
revolution in its scientific and cultural context, exploring the actual creation of scientific knowledge during one
of the most significant episodes in the history of physics, showing how this new, difficult idea quickly displaced
the central idea of Newtonian physics: Force. The Energy idea spread rapidly across the educated minds of
Europe, feeding old metaphorical extensions, as it reinforced the conquest of industrial mechanization. As this
book seems written for Smith's fellow scholars, I added extra explanatory sections to help the non-specialists.

AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHY
Crosbie Smith read History & Philosophy of Science (HPS) at Clare College, Cambridge, and graduated with
first class honours. His postgraduate research on the history of Victorian steam power culminated in a PhD from
the University of Cambridge. Appointed a Research Fellow in History of Science, he was one of the founding
members of the History of Science group at the University of Kent. In 1990, Professor Smith's book, Energy
and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1989), researched and written jointly with Norton Wise (University
of California Los Angeles), won the History of Science Society’s Annual Pfizer Award for the best scholarly
book published in the field of over 100 books considered by the Prize Committee. This Science of Energy also
won the Pfizer Award (2000). Only the Isaac Newton biographer, Richard Westfall, had ever won this
international prize, twice over. In 2002, Crosbie Smith received an Arts and Humanities Research Board
(AHRB) grant totalling £445,000 for a research project on the history of ocean steam navigation in the
Victorian period. He has presented papers on maritime themes at the Universities of Liverpool, Oxford, Exeter,
Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Belfast and St Andrews as well as the Institute of Historical Research in London, the
National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and Harvard University. He served as Secretary of the British Society
for the History of Science between 1989 and 1995 and as Editor of the British Journal for the History of Science
from 1999 until 2004. He is professor in History and Cultural Studies of Science and director of the Centre for
History and Cultural Studies of Science at Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury. He is author
of Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology and Coal, Steam and Ships: Engineering, Enterprise
and Empire. He is coauthor of Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin and coeditor of
Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge.

REVIEWER'S WEBSITE
All of the reviewer's prior essays (referenced herein) may be found, freely available at:
[Link]
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1 INTRODUCTION: AN ENERGY REVOLUTION
This story of Energy illustrates how new scientific ideas arise and then influence the broader society.
Sociologists have long recognized the power of the social context to promote or hold back innovation. In the
19th century, better communications encouraged enhanced co-operation in science, moving beyond the lone
innovator. It is particularly appropriate that the author tells the story of the Northern Rebels, whose clients had
ships to build and factories to empower. Luckily for these rebels, Scotland had a cultural tradition of
independence that began with their democratic tradition of organizing their churches, while their intellectuals
were still committed to 'Common Sense' philosophy. These contrasted with the aristocratic (top-down)
management of English society that had been the dominant style in both religion (since Henry VIII) and
education (Oxford and Cambridge) that rewarded memorization and competitive exams, particularly in
mathematics. It is not a coincidence that this was the Victorian age of industrialism, where inventors and
capitalists were both trying to maximize 'work' and minimize its cost, so eventually the new concept of Energy
linked directly to Work and then expanding areas of interaction, such as Mechanics, Heat, Electricity and
Chemistry. Institutions were vital in spreading these new ideas; these included Scottish universities, marine
engineering companies and scientific societies, especially the British Association for the Advancement of
Science (BAAS). Smith emphasizes the importance of credibility: when a new project is successful and helps
other scientists to enhance their reputation then local credibility is expanded that often attracts real capital for
new equipment and hiring more helpers (technicians and technologists).
WARNING: The book has a lot about Thermodynamics - one of the toughest parts of undergrad physics.
2 THE SCOTTISH CONTEXT
2.1 SOCIAL REVOLUTION
Crosbie Smith was right in emphasizing the social context in Scotland when these new scientific ideas were
developing. Most European countries were too stable (preserving the Status Quo that privileged a few) to risk
the unknown effects of new ideas. Scotland was unusual; legally part of the UK since the Act of Union (1707)
but culturally very different; the rebellious Highland clans had been squashed in 1745 with the last Stuart
uprising that reinforced the power of the Scottish commercial elites in Edinburgh and Glasgow. However, it
was the theological differences that most deeply divided Scotland from England. Calvin had strongly
influenced John Knox who had evangelized the whole of Scottish society with its bottom-up control of religious
institutions (known as Presbyterianism) that contrasted with the top down Anglican organization, inherited
from the Catholic Church and preserved politically, when England's king Henry VIII rebelled against Rome.
2.1.1 RELIGIOUS TURMOIL
The five Scottish universities played a broader role in their society that the few English ones, dominated by
Oxford and Cambridge that educated the sons of the privileged English elite and imposed formal commitment
to Anglican beliefs, excluding the clever sons of free-thinking merchants. The period 1840 to 1860 was one of
exceptional instability in Scottish academic culture, where a professor's income was heavily dependent on
student fees (50% paid directly to the professor). Even in the genteel Georgian grandeur of Edinburgh's New
Town, the illusory stability of the Scottish Enlightenment began to fragment with the rise of powerful new
cultural and religious movements; not least related to the rapid industrialization of the Clyde valley around
Scotland's commercial center, Glasgow. Most Scottish Arts undergraduates aspired to a career in the ministry
of the Scottish Kirk; unlike in England, the education of these future ministers involved much attendance at
Natural Philosophy classes (as physics was then called); only later, during their Masters-level study did they go
deeply into theology. As Scottish presbyterian culture showed many signs of falling apart, the promoters of the
science of energy (this story's protagonists) began to advance the new physics (natural philosophy) as a counter
to the lures of enthusiastic biblical revivals and evolutionary materialism, as they helped promote a new
'moderate' form of presbyterianism. It must be remembered that 1860 was when Charles Darwin published his
most revolutionary book ("Origin of Species") that split the Anglican theologian/scientists and saw the rise of
the new science "professionals" like Thomas Huxley, Darwin's "Bulldog", who desired to be on the public pay-
roll rather than simply 'gentlemen of independent means'.
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[Link] CHALMERS
Modern education today is so parochial that few know about the great ideological innovators of the past. One
of the most important in Scotland was Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847); famous preacher, academic and
theologian. He was the one man who did most to split the Scottish church into Established and Free branches.
After Chalmers' death, factions within the Free Kirk became more assertive in their biblical literalism, mainly
concerning the Genesis account of the Creation. Chalmers was the point man (his collected writings appeared
in 25 volumes); he entered Edinburgh University in 1800 after taking his BA at the University of St. Andrews.
He was unsuccessful in his first attempt as a candidate for the Edinburgh chair of mathematics. By 1814, he
became a leading evangelical preacher in Glasgow addressing large, enthusiastic crowds. His popular sermons
emphasized the fallen state of man and the need for individual redemption through Christ. Chalmers became
professor of moral philosophy at St. Andrews in 1823 and became professor of divinity at Edinburgh in 1827.
One of Chalmers' most powerful distinctions was that between natural history (biology) and natural philosophy
(physics). Natural history tried to classify the real resemblances existing among objects, both inanimate and
animate, such as species. These comparisons had long been considered timeless (true since the Creation).
Natural philosophy was the science of successive nature defining the incessant but regular (and law-like)
observed changes. Unfortunately, since Newton the academics had offered mathematical descriptions of the
imagined changes in position. Newton's physics was grounded on the idea of instantaneous changes (calculus)
in speed (actually, directional velocity and momentum), while the changes in chemistry occurred at a scale far
below that of observations. Chalmers believed that the Laws of Natural Philosophy (like Newton's Laws of
Motion) by themselves were inadequate to account for the relations of our existing natural history. [Even
modern science cannot bridge the chasm between atoms and biochemistry; worse: all systems involving the
calculus need to specify the unknown starting conditions, e.g. at time zero]. Natural history, rather than natural
philosophy, thus provided the basis for a limited natural theology: this accounts for the greater social disputes
over Evolution than the 'Big Bang'. The challenge is that centuries of theological imaginations have decided
that God's natural attributes span the range from all-powerful, through all-knowing, permanent existence and
infinity (an idea that mathematicians have hijacked). Chalmers was unusual (for his time) in not believing that
morality flowed directly from nature. He was well aware of the moral perversities of man as seen in history.
Indeed, Chalmers saw nature as subject to decay, disease and death, as all things were temporal so that theology
tried to compensate for this with promises of eternal paradise. This left only the 'uncreated God' as absolute,
eternal and enduring; even recent calculations indicated that our own solar system was not an eternally stable,
perpetual motion machine. Ultimately, in this view, only an optimistic theology could offer any hope against a
deeply pessimistic mechanical and deterministic view of reality.
2.1.2 ECONOMIC TURMOIL
The industrial revolution was producing economic disruptions, especially in the Clyde Valley where skilled
weavers were being displaced by mechanization. This had produced a political movement called the Chartists,
who were a radical political resistance to industrialism (the Luddites were simply destroying the machines),
based on the People's Charter of 1838. In 1848, a serious riot broke our in Glasgow, when a ferocious group of
men and women took over the streets, driving the police into their headquarters. This was misinterpreted as the
Established Church failing in its responsibilities towards the urban poor when this was the early evidence that
the industrial capitalists only cared about lining their own pockets.
3 THE STEAM REVOLUTION
3.1 INDUSTRIALISM
Until the industrial revolution started delivering real returns on investments in technology there had long been a
growing divergence between Science and Technology. Beginning with the Athenian Greeks, intellectuals
(often coming from ruling aristocratic families) sneered at the skills and knowledge of craftsmen because they
were too useful and not abstract, like their own thinking. Even physicians were put down, as their skills were
mostly in their hands, not in their mouths.

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It was no coincidence that clever Athenians revered mathematics, with Plato adopting the magical ideas of
Pythagoras. This launched the inventions of geometry because of the generality of its definitions (like a circle)
and its model of truth-making (deriving a 'Proof') that reinforced the linear style of thinking that these talkers
excelled in. These insights could be readily written down (Euclid's "Elements") and passed down through
generations of teachers and students. This preference for memorization and writing emerged again around 1100
with the appearance of several new universities across Europe. Three new professions (lawyers, priests and
mathematicians) sprang from this source of ambitious young men. Almost all Natural Philosophers (scientists)
emerging around 1600 began as mathematicians, as illustrated by Galileo, Kepler and Newton. Although a few
alchemists tried to find the method of producing gold from non-precious metals, most of the early scientists still
recruited men fascinated and competent in mathematics. This divide persisted in most European countries until
about 1900 when the German chemical industry moved into a dominant position by rewarding research into
coal products and the invention of textile dyes and deadly high explosives. The two wars merged scientists and
engineers to devise new military inventions, especially using advanced electronics that produced radar. Post
World War II saw industry also recruiting more of the specialists to produce both a range of consumer and
corporate products, reflecting the productivity of a more technologically-based science, while military
technology continued to expand, financed greatly by governments obsessed with National Security.
3.2 STEAM ENGINES
The first effective steam engine was built by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. This was a simple, fixed upright
hollow brass cylinder, closed at the bottom and open at the top, in which a piston was free to move. This was
the first practical engine to use a piston in a cylinder - a good tight fit was an engineering challenge. Steam
entered the cylinder from a nearby coal-fired boiler. A jet of cold water condensed the steam creating a partial
vacuum, so that atmospheric pressure on top of the piston drives it down to the bottom of the cylinder.
Newcomen added valves to automatically control the inlet of steam. This machine was able to pump water out
of deep mines, especially coal mines with lots of nearby fuel. About 100 were sold by 1750.
3.1 JAMES WATT IMPROVES THE STEAM ENGINE
It was the Scottish craftsman, James Watt (1736-1819) who dramatically improved this first design by keeping
the cylinder permanently hot by condensing the steam in a separate in a separate cooled vessel (condenser). He
needed to create a business partnership with Matthew Boulton, who employed a team of skilled artisans, who
could produce finely machined (precision) parts. Watt got a patent on his ideas in 1769 until 1800 that enabled
500 machines to be sold, as this exploited the expansive power of the steam pushing the piston, rather than the
weaker atmospheric air pressure. With the expiry of the patent in 1800, many inventors then jumped in with
improvements, especially much higher steam pressures using better boilers. These steam engines were soon
powering ships, locomotives and factories, empowering the Industrial Revolution: trading muscles for steam.
3.2 STEAM LOCOMOTIVES
The best new design came from Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick that was small enough to build a viable
locomotive engine. The first working railroad running on pairs of parallel steel rails opened in 1830 as the
Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Competition for speed and fuel efficiency continued to improve railway
engines. During the late 1830s and early 1840s, demand for motive power soared as railway engineers
constructed more compact and powerful locomotives to supply the insatiable demand for the transport of freight
and passengers throughout Britain, overcoming the limitations of poor roadways everywhere.
3.3 STEAM-ENGINE
Although George Stephenson is viewed by most historians (who follow the consensus) as the "Father of the
Railway" for his locomotive, the Rocket first used in 1830, on the first inter-city railway between Manchester
and Liverpool. Stephenson had met Trevithick and was familiar with his 'Cornish boiler', using a long
horizontal cylinder with a single large flue containing the coal fire on an iron grating and an ash-pan beneath to
collect the residues. At the far end, a large chimney encouraged a good air supply to increase the burning
temperature; Stephenson was better at business than most, so he made a financial success of 'his' railway.

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3.4 STEAM SHIPS
The banks of the Clyde were soon covered by shipbuilding yards working hard to build a stream of steamships.
By 1890, British shipyards built 75% of ships worldwide, two-thirds of which came from Clydeside.
4 THE MYSTERY OF HEAT
All this real engineering inspired the brothers James and William Thomson, along with William Macquorn
Rankine to create a theory of energy and thermodynamics that helped make these ship's engines world-beaters.
The father of the two brothers, James Thomson (1786-1849) had risen from farm laborer in Ulster (Northern
Ireland) to study mathematics at Glasgow University, where he eventually became the professor of mathematics
in 1832. He was taking advantage of Scotland's commitment to social advancement by relatively low-cost
education. By the age of 14, the younger James Thomson (1822-1892) had shown a passionate interest in
practical engineering. In 1840, when he graduated MA (honors in mathematics) at Glasgow College, Glasgow,
he had been appointed secretary of the models and manufactures committee for the 10th annual meeting of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science; this reinforced his conviction that Glasgow engineers,
rather than Cambridge mathematicians, were the real heroes of scientific and social progress. Young James also
met at these meetings Lewis Gordon, who had just been appointed Glasgow professor of civil engineering and
mechanics, the first such chair in a British university. It was Gordon who brought to Glasgow, first-hand
knowledge of several continental engineering schools. In France, these had bloomed after the Revolution under
Lazare Carnot, the head of the new Ecole Polytechnique, who maintained close links with engineering, while
emphasizing the mechanics of machines and geometrical analysis. In effect, Carnot had revived Gottfried
Leibniz's idea of vis viva (or kinetic energy) that had been ignored by the anti-metaphysical, empirically-minded
mathematicians of the Enlightenment, who more approved of Newton's direct intuition of Force inducing
changes in motion. The French had built up a cadre of theoretical engineers who studied the "work of forces" or
'engine performance'. Meanwhile, younger brother William (1824-1907), after completing his mathematics
examinations at Cambridge visited Paris in 1845 to improve his knowledge of experimental physics, so that he
might apply to succeed the ailing Glasgow professor of natural philosophy who had to give popular lectures to
students with little preparation in mathematics. This was a good decision as he was elected to the Glasgow chair
of natural philosophy in the next 12 months. The Thomson brothers were rare in being mathematicians, who
were interested in engineering, as most Cambridge mathematicians exposed to natural philosophy were more
interested in astronomy; in contrast, most practical engineers usually lacked mathematical expertise.
4.1 THE GENIUS OF MR. JOULE
James Prescott Joule (1818-1889) was another of those English dilettantes who were obsessed with science;
unusually he was very wealthy; his grandfather established a successful brewery in nearby Salford and by 1830
this was the largest in the area, allowing the Joules to buy a fine house in the best part of Manchester and switch
the family religion from non-conformity to the elite Anglican church. James was very fortunate to be educated
privately by first class tutors, including the "Father of Atomic Chemistry", John Dalton, who also showed him
the laboratory techniques pioneered by the French chemists. Unfortunately, he also adopted his teacher's caloric
theory of heat (the view that heat was a hot substance called 'caloric' that moved though bodies raising
temperature.) Joule was also unlucky in associating himself with a dubious science promoter William Sturgeon
who published an independent science journal and left London under a cloud to make his fortune in Manchester.
In promoting Joule's science articles, Sturgeon referred to Joule as an "ingenious inventor" but Joule was self-
promoting his image as an experimental philosopher. As such he tried to get a serious paper on the production
of heat in electrical conductors published in the prestigious "Transactions of the Royal Society" but it was
pushed out, in summary form, into the lower-ranked "Proceedings". Its value was later recognized by it being
named "Joule's Law" (I2R) of electric heating, a valuable contribution to the science of electrical currents. His
failure to make this important publication probably reflected the social snobbery of the senior members of the
Royal Society with their impressive degrees in mathematics from Cambridge University, like Herschel and
Airy. Joule's reputation had not been helped by disagreeing with science luminaries, like Faraday and Ampère.

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4.1.1 DYNAMICAL THEORY OF HEAT
In 1843, Joule announced in a series of Phil. Mag. papers that heat may not be a substance (like caloric) but
more like a vibration. He suggested there might exist a fixed relationship between a given 'quantity' of heat and
the amount of mechanical work that it could produce. Joule became convinced that the heat in the electrical
conductor was generated there and not transported from elsewhere. He was also impressed by the cannon-
boring measurements of count Rumford, where the mechanical boring effects of the friction directly produced
the heat. These observations led Joule to a dynamical theory of heat, but one involving rotations and not linear
motion (like Leibniz's kinetic energy). This was the older theory of heat that originated with Bacon, Newton
and Boyle and later supported by the experiments of Rumford, Davy and Forbes. Joule's appeal to these
honorable precedents was not sufficient to convince the mathematical philosophers of the Royal Society who
were also put off by this hypothetical style of reasoning; as well as Joule "not being a Gentleman", just 'rich'.
4.2 THE PERFECT HEAT ENGINE
The engineers working with steam engines and the capitalists who bought them were both very obsessed with
improving their efficiency: getting more work out of them for lower costs of inputs (especially coal). Even
scientists and mathematicians took a great interest in this subject, including several on the Continent. These
theoretical investigations resulted in two major scientific concepts: absolute temperature and entropy.
4.2.1 SADI CARNOT
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) was a mechanical engineer and scientist in the French Army; he
was an accomplished mathematical physicist. His father, Lazar named him Sadi after a famous Iranian poet.
His research into heat engines resulted in the publication of only one book in 1824: "Reflections on the Motive
Power of Fire" that was so influential, he is called the "father of thermodynamics" as it contained the first
successful theory of the maximum efficiency of heat engines. This book initially attracted little attention during
his short life but it was the basis of important later work by Lord Kelvin and Rudolf Clausius that helped them
formalize the second law of thermodynamics [see §5.6.3] and the concept of entropy [see §5.4]. The heart of
the Carnot idea is the cycling between two different temperatures that is independent of the working substance.
4.2.2 KELVIN
William Thomson was raised to the peerage in 1892, as Lord Kelvin by Queen Victoria (we will refer to him
by this baronial title hereafter, as history uses this name more than his original, prosaic family name). In 1848,
Kelvin conducted a theoretical analysis (a 'thought experiment') of a sealed cylinder of a gas (air or steam) that
avoided all guesses about the nature of any heat applied to the cylinder. Here he used Carnot's cycle theory.
The only assumption was that any gain or loss of heat only depended on the initial and final states and not on
the particular path between them. The first process yielded work by a reversible compression and expansion of
the gas filling a perfectly insulated cylinder of volume V0 at temperature T0. The piston is then pushed down
slowly, squeezing the gas without any heat gained or lost ('adiabatic compression') but raising its pressure and
temperature. He then imagined that the sides of the cylinder allowed heat to enter that caused the gas to expand
to its original volume. As the gas returns to its original volume (but at a higher temperature) then the piston will
return to its original position; the whole cycle delivers some net useful work against the external load. This
produced a fall in pressure at constant temperature. Kelvin then imagined a second process where the volume
of gas is held constant but its temperature gradually increases; this second process does no net work as the
volume of gas remains fixed. This was a paradox: one path produced net work and the other did not. He
deduced that the quantity of heat must be a 'state function', only sensitive to the system's temperature. Perhaps,
the paradox related to using Carnot's perfect heat engine that was isolated from the rest of the universe, so it
ignored metallic conduction and radiant energy. Physics often simplifies with its assumptions of 'perfection'.
4.2.3 CLAUSIUS
It required a Prussian theorist who resolved Kelvin's paradox: Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) researched the
phenomenon of elasticisty that was temperature sensitive. His insights were published in 1850 in the paper
"On the Moving Force of Heat" where he referenced Kelvin's recent writings and emphasized the bad guess that
"no heat is lost". Clausius' approach was a purely mathematical solution with no proposals about heat's nature.

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5 THE SCIENCE OF THERMODYNAMICS
The invention of the steam engine indicated there must be a connection between heat (as in steam) and work,
like lifting weights against gravity. Before the atomic theory of matter was accepted, the nature of heat was a
real problem; one could easily detect that a stone or a pan of water got hot when placed on burning wood but the
pan nor water were burning and both remained hot for a while thereafter, staying warm if not hot. These ideas
introduced the idea of temperature: some wished to associate a larger number (for the temperature) of a hotter
body than a warm or cooler one. Scientists, like Fahrenheit, soon created devices they called thermometers that
readily displayed the range of temperatures, if not too large. Three other effects were confusing this situation,
when stood near a fire or directly in the sun one experienced the heating effect directly. Joule had also shown
that when a copper wire carries electrical current (while connected to a voltaic battery §4.2) it also gets hotter.
Also, when certain chemicals are mixed together, they also produce heat; in some cases, they spontaneously
ignite. Physicists only recognized three states of matter: solid, liquid and gases; so it was 'natural' to assume
that heat was a form of matter: an invisible liquid or gas they called 'caloric' that could flow through a sold
body from hot regions to colder ones, warming any regions it passed through.
5.1 WORK AND HEAT
The term 'Thermodynamics' was first proposed by William Thomson at a meeting of the Royal Society of
Edinburgh in 1854. One of the first academics to write a textbook on thermodynamics, Manual of the Steam
Engine, was William Rankine (1820-1872) who was a professor of engineering at Glasgow University from
1855; he collaborated closely with William Thomson. Along with the German, Rudolf Claudius (1822-1888)
they formulated the first two laws of thermodynamics [§5.6]. It was Rankine who first proposed the key feature
of the new concept of energy in 1853 as the capacity to effect changes. This may be contrasted with Newton's
concept of force as actually making the changes now, as in his analogy with human muscles. Unfortunately,
Rankine insisted that energy physically existed as vortices in matter and this image distracted many away from
his fruitful abstract definition, such as Thomson and Maxwell. Indeed, Tait wrote in a letter to Maxwell, that
"both Rankine and Clausius are about as obscure in their writings on Thermodynamics as anyone can be".
Maxwell responded with words of wisdom (for any physicist) in praising Thomson, who "has always been most
careful to point out the exact extent of his assumptions and experimental observations on which each of his
statements is based; he avoids using quantities which are not capable of experimental measurement." Kelvin
was too busy on practical projects (like the Atlantic cable) to find much time for writing textbooks or treatises
[except, see §7.3].
5.2 CONSERVATION OF ENERGY
In the two sciences of matter, physics and chemistry, it is now believed that the total energy of an isolated set of
matter remains constant (or "conserved over time"); this is known as the Law of Conservation of Energy. In
1669, Christian Huygens published his laws of collision. He discovered that certain total quantities were the
same both before and after he collision; the most obvious were the linear momenta and kinetic energies. The
results were not perfect as the difference between elastic and inelastic collision was not understood at the time.
A few years later, Gottfried Leibniz proved mathematically these results, even when the masses and velocities
of the colliding particles were quite different, as long as the masses did not interact. He called the quantity that
he calculated: MV2 its vis viva (or living force of the system). This quantity (with a factor 1/2 in its modern
definition) is called its kinetic energy (or energy of motion), which is conserved when there is no friction. At
that time, other physicists, like Newton, considered its linear momentum (MV) as a better candidate because it
was also conserved even with friction. The modern space-time view holds that it is the blend that is conserved.
We now know that the various forms of energy are interchangeable, so that energy can neither be created nor
destroyed. One consequence of this is that there can be no perpetual motion machine that is independent of
external energy supplies. However, in 1865 the Astronomer Royal John Herschel pointed out was always true
when it contained an arbitrary amount of "potential energy" as introduced by Rankine. The much admired
Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was also not impressed with this attention being focused on this new abstract
concept as being too mechanical and diverting attention away from viewing his Christian God as one of power.

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5.3 ABSOLUTE TEMPERATURE
Smith has the bad habit of assuming his readers are familiar with his terms; as an example, in discussing the
idea of temperature he jumps directly to Kelvin's invention of absolute temperature with only a couple of lines
dismissing conventional thermometers that divide the arbitrary numbers assigned to freezing and boiling -points
into an arbitrary number of equal units. He assumes that he can use the Carnot theory [see $4.2.1]. He begins
with the requirement that all degrees have the same value according to the Equivalence of Mechanical Work;
that is: A quantity of heat transferred from a body, A at temperature Tº, to a body B at temperature (T–1)º on
this scale would produce the same amount of work, for all temperatures Tº, for any materials used for A and B.
In honor of Lord Kelvin's work, these units of absolute temperature are referred to as "degrees Kelvin" or ºK.

Absolute zero, at which all activity would stop if it were possible to achieve, is −273.15°C (degrees Celsius), or
−459.67°F (degrees Fahrenheit), or 0°K (degrees Kelvin), or 0°R (degrees Rankine).
5.4 LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS
Thermodynamics is principally based on a set of four laws, which are universally valid when applied to systems
that fall within the constraints implied by each. In the various theoretical descriptions of thermodynamics these
laws may be expressed in seemingly differing forms but the most prominent formulations are the following.
5.4.1 ZEROTH LAW
If two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each
other. This statement implies that thermal equilibrium is an equivalence relation on the set of thermodynamic
systems. Systems are said to be in equilibrium if the small, random exchanges between them (e.g. Brownian
motion) do not lead to a net change in energy. This law is tacitly assumed in every measurement of temperature.
Thus, if one seeks to decide whether two bodies are at the same temperature, it is not necessary to bring them
into contact and measure any changes of their observable properties in time. The law provides an empirical
definition of temperature, and justification for the construction of practical thermometers. The zeroth law was
not initially recognized as a separate law of thermodynamics, as its basis in assuming thermodynamical
equilibrium was implied in the other laws. The first, second, and third laws had been explicitly stated already,
and found common acceptance in the physics community before the importance of the zeroth law for the
definition of temperature was realized. As it was impractical to renumber the other laws, it was named the
zeroth law.
5.4.2 FIRST LAW
In a process without transfer of matter, the change in "internal energy" (U) of a thermodynamic system is equal
to the energy gained as heat, Q, less the thermodynamic work, W, done by the system: .

For processes that include transfer of matter, a further statement is needed: with due account of the respective
reference states of the systems, when two systems, which may be of different chemical compositions, initially
separated only by an impermeable wall, and otherwise isolated, are combined into a new system by the careful
operation of removal of the wall, then where U0 denotes the internal energy of the combined system, and U1
and U2 denote the internal energies of the respective separated systems. Adapted here now for thermodynamics,
this law is an expression of the principle of conservation of energy, which states that energy can be transformed
(changed from one form to another), but cannot be created or destroyed.

Internal energy is a principal property of the theoretical thermodynamic state, while heat and work are modes of
energy transfer by which a process may change this state. A change of internal energy of a system may be
achieved by any combination of heat added or removed and work performed on or by the system. As a function
of state, the internal energy does not depend on the manner, or on the path through intermediate steps, by which
the system arrived at its state.

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5.4.3 SECOND LAW
Heat does not spontaneously (naturally) flow from a colder body to a hotter.
The second law refers to a system of matter and radiation, initially with inhomogeneities in temperature,
pressure, chemical potential that are due to internal 'constraints', or impermeable rigid walls, within it, or to
externally imposed forces. The law observes that, when the system is isolated from the outside world and from
those forces, there is a definite thermodynamic quantity, called its Entropy, that increases as the constraints are
removed, eventually reaching a maximum value at thermodynamic equilibrium, when the inhomogeneities
practically vanish. For systems that are initially far from thermodynamic equilibrium, though several have been
proposed, there is known no general physical principle that determines the rates of approach to thermodynamic
equilibrium, and thermodynamics does not deal with such rates. The many versions of the second law all
express the irreversibility of such approach to thermodynamic equilibrium as no thing can be isolated. In
macroscopic thermodynamics, the second law is a basic observation applicable to any actual thermodynamic
process; in statistical thermodynamics, the second law is postulated to be a consequence of molecular chaos.
5.4.4 THIRD LAW
As the temperature of a system approaches absolute zero, all processes cease and the entropy of the system
approaches a minimum value.
This law of thermodynamics is a statistical law of nature regarding entropy and the impossibility of reaching the
absolute zero of temperature. This law provides an absolute reference point for the determination of entropy.
The entropy determined relative to this point is the absolute entropy. Alternate definitions include "the entropy
of all systems and of all states of a system is smallest at absolute zero," or equivalently "it is impossible to reach
the absolute zero of temperature by any finite number of processes".
6 THE WAR FOR THE FUTURE OF BRITISH SCIENCE
Smith makes his pivotal chapter the rivalry between three groups of British Science for control of the science
agenda for the second half of the Victorian Era. The two major battlegrounds were natural philosophy (physics)
and biology (evolution).
6.1 NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
The Scottish Rebels were keen to bring practical reality into the sacred halls of Academia, where mathematics
had dominated Natural Philosophy since Isaac Newton's leadership of Trinity College, Cambridge University.
Smith dedicates a whole chapter on how the Rebels tried to persuade the Cambridge elite in expanding their
conceptual focus away from Newton's older ideas and re build them around the new idea of energy that was
arising. In effect, the Cambridge science dons were under a two-front attack as Huxley and his fellow members
of the X-Club were using Darwin's evolutionary theory to promote a 'gospel' of "Scientific Naturalism" to
displace the well-entrenched hold of the clerical, gentlemanly dons, who were viewed as outmoded relics of
pre-professionalized science by these biological radicals. The Energy-Rebels were competing with scientific
naturalism but with the significant advantage that it posed no threat to the traditional public harmony between
science and theology within the ancient institution. There was another battleground evolving in this 'war'
between the Old Guard (representing the Royal Society) and the peripatetic British Association with its more
open Philosophical Magazine offering a broader forum for the new ideas. Each rebel group had its chief
spokesman: P.G. Tait (for the Energists) and John Tyndall (for the X-Club); with each group contending to
become the controllers of the next generations scientific authority. Tyndall's strategy was to wrest control of the
new energy concepts and place them in the service of Scientific Naturalism. Knowing that Joule was a hero of
the Northern Rebels and being well aware of new German Heat-Physics, he hoped to build an alliance with J. R.
Mayer. There was also a theological / biological dimension as Kelvin believed the sun could not have been
active long enough for the extended time-frames assumed by Darwin's evolutionary theory. Kelvin addressed
the 1861 meeting of the BAAS on the subject of the sun's heat and the probable ages of the sun and a shorter
existence for the earth. These aged-sun arguments were summarized in the Phil. Mag. in 1862 with the target
being geologist Charles Lyell's steady-state theory of the earth that were a key foundation for Darwin's
evolutionary theory.
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6.1.1 PETER GUTHRIE TAIT
Kelvin's chief ally here was the new professor of natural philosophy, Peter Guthrie Tait [1831-1901]. Whereas
Kelvin's father [see §4.0] had descended from a family of yeomen farmers, Tait's father had been personal
secretary to the fifth Duke of Buccleuch, one of the wealthiest and most powerful aristocratic families in
Scotland. Tait attended St. Peter's College, Cambridge at the same time as Kelvin, who he bested later in the
undergraduate mathematics examinations, winning top prize ('Senior Wrangler') in the mathematics Tripos and
coming first in Smith prizeman competition in 1852. Within two years he was offered the mathematics
professorship at Queen's College, Belfast. While there, he allied himself with the great Irish polymath [and my
hero, see UET1] William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) who invented the powerful quaternion methods that
impressed both Maxwell and Tait [and became the source of my 4D Natural Vectors] but irritated the less-
imaginative Kelvin, who was happy with the more traditional (and limited) 3D vectors. In 1857, Tait married
one of the few female students, Margaret Porter. Tait competed with Maxwell for two professorships in natural
philosophy with Tait gaining the chair in Edinburgh in 1860, where he remained for the rest of his life. One
year later, Maxwell won his appointment to the new Cavendish chair at Cambridge. Tait's first book was a
textbook on Newtonian physics, Dynamics of a Particle (1856) that presented natural philosophy as a science,
which treated matter and its forces, where a force was defined as "any cause, which produces a change in a
body's state of rest or motion"; its branches were mechanics, astronomy (gravity), optics and hydrodynamics.
This text was soon to be obsoleted with his co-authorship with Kelvin in their masterpiece Treatise on Natural
Philosophy [see $7.3]. In the meantime, Tait's rivalry with Tyndall was becoming well known. Tait was invited
by the editor of the North British Review to contribute an article on Tyndall's Theory of Heat. Tait responded
with two articles in the next 12 months. The first became the basis for Tait's 1868 book Sketch of
Thermodynamics, while the second became the basis for Historical Sketch of the Science of Energy. These
offered controversial commentary on Tyndall's German ally (Mayer) as the very embodiment of illegitimate
scientific practice. Thus, Tait was reinforcing the authority of the North British 'scientists of energy' using the
best methods of science. By labeling Mayer as a physician rather than a physicist, calling into question his little
experience in experimental physics, by pointing out his reliance on metaphysical principles and associating him
with the science of the pre-Reformation 'dark ages', Tait sought to secure the reputation of Joule as well as the
whole authoritative basis of a North British science of energy against the real threats of its appropriation by the
scientific naturalists, especially Germans!
6.1.2 JOHN TYNDALL
John Tyndall's (1820-1893) origins should have directly gained him membership in the North British natural
philosophers as he was born into a poor Irish family in Belfast; his father was a police officer in the Irish
Constabulary; he learnt his first useful mathematics (land surveying) from his Catholic schoolmaster. He
worked awhile for a surveying firm working in the 'railway mania' that enabled him to save for a university
education in Marburg, Germany under the chemist Robert Bunsen; he gained a PhD on the mathematics of
screw surfaces. He used this time well, making good connections with several of the leading German scientists.
On his return to Britain, he translated several German scientific papers into English for the Phil. Mag. including
one by Clausius on the mechanical theory of heat. He was elected FRS in 1852. In 1851, he first met Faraday,
who had a common interest in diamagnetism that eventually paid off when he was offered the chair of natural
philosophy at Faraday's Royal Institute. He was now at the heart of elite metropolitan science, where he
cultivated some of the Old Lions of British science. Tyndall had met Kelvin at several meetings of the BAAS
and there was little love lost between them. Kelvin was unimpressed with Tyndall's limited mathematics skills,
while Tyndall believed that Kelvin would pretend to have being misunderstood, rather than admitting to a
change of mind. Tyndall gave a series of public lectures at the Royal Institute in 1862; deliberately he said that
Mayer ('the man of genius') had arrived first in the most important results in heat science. He strengthened his
case by quoting two leading German scientists (Clausius and Helmholtz) who had promoted the Dynamical
Theory of Heat. These claims really annoyed Joule, who was always sensitive about his priorities, so he wrote a
letter to Kelvin complaining about Tyndall's statements based only on speculation and not on experiments. As
Huxley's staunchest ally, Tyndall was preparing to deploy 'conservation of energy' for scientific naturalism.
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6.1.3 ROBERT MAYER
Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878) was a German physician and physicist and one of the founders of
thermodynamics. He is best known for enunciating in 1841 one of the original statements of the conservation
of energy; what evolved into the first law of thermodynamics: "energy can be neither created nor destroyed".
Joule publicly declared that his claim was based on experiment, unlike Mayer's theoretical prediction.
6.1.4 HERMANN HELMHOLTZ
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), a German physician and natural philosopher, who made original
contributions in physiology and psychology (vision) and theoretical suggestions in thermodynamics. Building
on earlier efforts, Helmholtz proposed ('guessed') a relationship between mechanics, heat, light and electricity
by treating them all as manifestations of a single 'force' (or energy, in today's terminology). These were
published in his 1847 book Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (On the Conservation of Force). Both Helmholtz and
Mayer used physics to attack the idea that living matter depended on a special 'vital force', Lebenskraft.
6.2 NATURAL HISTORY (Biology)
6.2.1 DARWINISM
In addition to the threats against the traditional scientific consensus spearheaded by the new physics ideas about
energy there was the more contentious ideas published in 1859 by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) On the Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection [see my essay Evolution]. The 1860 meeting of the BAAS in Oxford
was the occasion of the infamous first debate on evolution between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce; traditional
Christians amongst the Northern Rebels like Maxwell and Kelvin adamantly opposed Darwinian Evolution.
[Link] THOMAS HUXLEY
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) was an English biologist and anthropologist, specializing in comparative
anatomy. He is known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his powerful advocacy of Darwin's theory of evolution.
Originally coining the term 'agnosticism' in 1869, Huxley elaborated on this idea later to frame the nature of
claims in terms of what is knowable and what is not. Huxley states:
Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous
application of a single principle the fundamental axiom of modern science. In matters of the
intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration.

In January 1862 Huxley drew large numbers of workingmen to a public meeting in Edinburgh. His now
standard linkage between man and ape was well received. The evolutionary alliance of Darwin and Huxley had
launched a social crusade among Scotland's working classes that worried the conservative elite.
7 NEWTON REINVENTED
7.1 THE TREATISE [ T&T' ]
By 1850, there was a growing dissatisfaction with Newton's overly mathematical description of mechanical
reality; even Maxwell tried to create a different ontology (using continuous fields, rather than discrete particles).
William Thompson (future Lord Kelvin) and Tait saw this as an opportunity to redraw mechanics around their
new concept of energy, rather than Newton's analogy with human muscles and particle collisions [see Billiards
essay]. In particular, their rival Tyndall was also building his attack on the old idea of Force that the Northern
British wanted to displace with a more coherent set of concepts grounded in the universal idea of energy. As
former wranglers in the Cambridge Tripos, these two winners were well placed to move the curriculum of the
natural philosophy focus as Cambridge if they could offer a replacement textbook to Newton's Principia. Their
original plan was for a four volume treatise on all of physical science, entitled Treatise on Natural Philosophy
but it took five years to complete only the first part, on mechanics, familiarly known as T&T' on account of the
way Thomson (T) and Tait (T') addressed one another in their correspondence. I have found it a well-written,
coherent approach to Classical Mechanics; strongly recommended for physics students, seeking a coherent view
of classical physics.

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A strong preference for direct geometrical modes of expression, while minimizing symbolic abstraction made
for an attractive presentation (as I can personally attest). The authors believed they had restored the true
Newtonian gospel but it was too radical to change the commitments of traditional conservative physics
professors. Two other approaches, using Lagrangian and Hamiltonian concepts, have taken over the teaching of
mathematical physics today that marry Newton's calculus to Maxwell's field concept, so that few students now
have even opened T&T'; so it maybe a good thing for these two clever men not to wasted their lives writing the
final three volumes, although it was Thomson who became too busy with his many other projects; there was
also the role of Hamilton's quaternions that bedazzled Tait but Thomson found distracting. Like Tait, I too
have been most impressed with quaternions that have grounded my rewriting of physics over the last ten years
in my radical Universal Electron Theory (UET) that began with an extension of quaternions (UET1) with the
addition of the square root of minus one to the scalar component, rounding out all four roots of minus one. By
removing the focus from Force and its implied external agency, the authors had incorporated the idea of Least
Action from the Great Hamilton, so that a system could be self-configuring just by minimizing its action. I too
have found this a fruitful method and it leads directly to microscopic quantized action without introducing the
logical contradiction of viewing an electron as both a particle and a wave that is artificially hypothesized into all
other versions of quantum mechanics. Tait positioned action (or inter-action) as the rate of production of
kinetic energy: the simplest form of activity. Thomson agreed by viewing every possible displacement of a
dynamical system producing work done (by the 'applied forces') must equal the change in kinetic energy. This
emphasis on energy encouraged Maxwell to write in a review of T&T' that it enables mathematical physicists to
avoid speculations about the hidden machinery of nature and still produce fruitful results; praise that was
echoed by Helmholtz, when he translated this fine book into German.
8 MAXWELL
Smith actually titles his eleventh chapter as "Gentleman of Energy", reflecting the public image of this titan of
science, who was born in Edinburgh as James Clerk in 1831, whose father added the family name Maxwell to
inherit a valuable estate that required the owner to preserve the name. James lost his mother to stomach cancer
when he was eight years old (and killed him 40 years later). After private tutoring James attended Edinburgh
Academy, a prestigious institution that promoted an English-style liberal education, this led to him being
equally at home with presbyterian and episcopal forms of protestantism going regularly to both churches on
Sundays. His memory was so phenomenal that he could recall long sermons perfectly. James entered Edinburgh
University at the age of sixteen studying natural philosophy under professor Forbes. In 1850, Maxwell
transferred to Trinity College, Cambridge University, graduated as second wrangler and Smith's prizeman in
1854 to be rewarded with a Trinity College Fellowship in the following year. Only one year later he obtained
the chair of natural philosophy at Marischal College (Aberdeen) and became engaged to Katharine, daughter of
the college's Principal. Consolidation of the Aberdeen colleges forced Maxwell to take the chair at King's
College, London, where he stayed until he got the Cavendish chair at Cambridge in 1865.
8.1 ELECTRICITY
Maxwell published his first electrical paper in 1858 "On Faraday's Lines of Force", where he mathematized
Faraday's intuition of magnetic field (seen with iron filings) that he introduced in 1846 and linked into "lines of
magnetic force" with Thomson in 1851. Maxwell believed deeply in the reality of his (mathematical) fields and
published an extensive justification of the Aether in the next Encyclopedia Britannica.
8.1.1 FARADAY
Michael Faraday (1791-1867) made major contributions to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry,
although he had minimal formal education. His discovery of induction led to electric motor technology so that
electricity became a useful technology. Faraday was an excellent experimentalist who conveyed his ideas in
clear and simple language; his mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Faraday was aware
of Maxwell's growing reputation, so that he sent Maxwell a copy of his "On the Conservation of Force", later
clarified by the word force he was meaning the sources of all possible interactions: not Newton's meaning.

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8.2 FAR-ACTION
For private religious reasons, Maxwell was opposed to Weber's electrodynamics, mistakenly believing that Far-
Action violated energy conservation. Maxwell believed his God was everywhere in space at all times whereas
Weber (and Newton) only saw material existence occurring at special points in space with nothing in between
them; the Faraday/Maxwell 'field' spread everywhere with space being filled with the aetherial medium;
implicit in his approach, Maxwell was invoking the geometry of motion of an imaginary fluid, without
suggesting any causal mechanisms. Deliberately, the mathematics appealed to the older strong mathematicians
who had spent years working with Newton's calculus and its partial derivatives offspring. These ideas are
analyzed further in my second chapter of my third UET paper (UET3) along with a critique of Maxwell's flawed
metaphysics in UET2. Finally in 1865, Maxwell published his third electrical paper based on Lagrange's
Dynamical Equation and dropped his silly vortex model that was the heart of his second electrical paper.
8.3 THE EM TREATISE
Encouraged by Tait and independently by Lord Rayleigh in 1869, Maxwell was inspired to transform his
various electrical papers along with adding the latest electrical research and last (but not least) to differentiate
his field approach from the rival Far-Action theories. By 1869, Maxwell had an agreement with the Oxford
Press and he had sketched out the contents of the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism that ignored all rival
theories. Ironically, only the fourth and final part of the Treatise (electrodynamics) featured the new energy
concept. Without identifying any mechanism for electricity (as electrons had yet to be discovered), Maxwell
said his aim was "to translate the language of the calculus into the language of dynamics, so that our words may
call up the mental image, not of some algebraic process, but of some property of moving bodies." Here the
sleight of hand was being invoked to reify the ancient aether that Maxwell was convinced as being necessary for
his whole approach. Finally, there were 16 equations that only got reduced to the "famous four" by Heaviside
after Maxwell died. Kelvin was frustrated because he could detect no mechanism in Maxwell's theory; he (as I
am) was not to be satisfied with appeals to a mysterious medium that was too subtle to be imagined.
8.4 ANGELS and DEMONS
Both Maxwell and Kelvin were obsessed with friction - or, as they called it 'Dissipation'; irreversible activity
always resulting in loss. Indeed, they saw it as central to their message against the Materialists, especially as
this reinforced their message of Christianity with its finite beginnings and endings to the visible cosmos.
Mankind's finite nature explained our spiritual failings, where man had to obey the Laws of God. With their
Calvinist roots, these Scottish Presbyterians regarded man, made in the image of God, as a creature of will
rather than reason. These men placed a high premium on scientific texts. Symbolism, mystification and
complex displays of mathematical skill echoed the evils of Roman Catholicism, whereas practicality, direct
experience and simplicity of problem-solving technique reflected the traditions of central Scotland. They
advocated a form of physics (with strong visualizable foundations accessible to everyone) in contrast to the far
more elite symbolic formulations of their continental rivals, like Weber and Helmholtz.
Inspired by some simple work by Clausius on molecular models of gases in 1859, Maxwell responded with a
more sophisticated 3D model of free particles, subject only to collisions (estimated at about 8 billion per
second) even though he was not convinced of the reality of inertial point-like molecules, he (like most Victorian
scientists had a preference for continuum theories of matter; hence the belief in the Aether). This led a series of
papers, all containing the phrase "Dynamical Theory of Gases" appearing from 1860 to 1866. None-the-less,
Maxwell adopted the model of perfectly elastic, spherical bodies. He went beyond the simple Average-Speed
model of Clausius and assumed that speeds are distributed according to the Gaussian Error Law (now called
here the Maxwell Distribution). His infamous model of 'Maxwell's demon" imagined a microscopic actor
watching molecules approaching a small gap that he could open or shut; allowing slower ('cold' particles)
through so moving heat from the colder to the hotter side. Maxwell still lived in the era (pre-quantum) that
believed that observations could be made without interference and without any energy exchange (God's view).
All of these papers assumed an idealized world of an isolated, finite system of perfectly elastic particles only
subject to conservative forces.

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8.5 ABSOLUTE UNITS
Smith includes a short chapter on absolute units for electricity that was an issue for the practical Scotsmen and
arose from the two views of electricity: statics and electric current. We now know that these are connected by
the absolute speed of light in a vacuum that was first determined by Weber (theory) and Fizeau (measured).
8.6 ENERGY FLOW
The book seems to 'run out of steam' at the end as Smith briefly describes the energy world after Maxwell's
tragic early death in 1879. A self-described British group of 'Maxwellians' consisted of Fitzgerald, Lodge and
the autodidact Heaviside, who reformulated Maxwell's 16 EM equations into the four vector equations that
retained their original name. They all tended to reify the concept of energy but were astonished by Hertz's
discovery of EM waves in 1888. Kelvin was appalled at Tait's seduction by the new, mathematical vectors and
treated the new ideas of electricity with contempt. FitzGerald and Lodge were both fanatically committed to
mechanical model-building that failed to appeal to the abstract Cambridge mathematicians. In contrast, the
innovative Heaviside developed his own new mathematics ('Operational Calculus') and focused on the 'principle
of activity' that expressed Newton's Third Law in terms of force times velocity or rate of working (action)
equivalent to rate of increase of kinetic energy (reaction); in this regard, his intuition was directing him to the
central role of Action in quantum physics; this view was confirmed by Joseph Larmor's electron model of
current and setting the principle of least action at the heart of electrodynamics (an approach I agree with).
Larmor (now Cavendish professor) aggressively challenged the prior view that energy was as fundamental as
matter; it was now to be seen as a statistical property of a set of interacting particles. The writing was beginning
to appear on the wall by 1880 when Max Planck (1858-1947) wrote his PhD thesis on the reformulation of
Entropy. Planck gradually moved closer to Boltzmann's probabilistic interpretation of the second law of
thermodynamics as he investigated the energy spectrum of black body radiation that he could only fit to the
experimental curves by arbitrarily guessing that energy exchanges were 'quantized' in 1900.
8.7 HISTORICAL ENERGY
It is appropriate, on seeing the role of religion in Victorian Britain that Smith concludes with a brief anecdote
about Britain's second greatest hero of science, Clerk Maxwell. He recalls a story from one of Maxwell's best
students, Karl Pearson (father of biological statistics) who remembers how furious Maxwell was when Pearson
spoke disrespectfully about the biblical story of Noah's flood during lunch. As Smith comments, this illustrates
how Maxwell at heart was a biblical literalist, committed to the truths of the sacred texts imbibed since a youth.
This story shows the real motivation of the scientists, who were truly theologians at heart, like most intellectuals
in the prior 500 years. This was the secret subtext of the emphasis on dissipation of energy that obsessed these
'practical' men; this was their private acknowledgement of their own imminent death that priests and
mathematicians have resisted for millennia as they refuse to think clearly about time and change [see Change].
One of the great algebraists of the era, W. K. Clifford wrote a searing critique of Old Testament religion in one
of the popular literary magazines in 1875, ending with: "How well and nobly whatsoever a man shall have
worked for his fellows, he must end by being either the eternal sycophant of a celestial despot, or the eternal
victim of a celestial executioner." These were deep metaphysical disagreements that have gone out of fashion
in the 20th century; evidence was sought for the beginning of the cosmos that did not arise until the 1920s.

Smith wraps up his book with an apology: he probably knows that he has failed to clarify the key concept of
energy for the general reader (not his primary audience) because he has tried to capture how this idea evolved in
the minds of the key scientists using the context that they found themselves in: mysterious, unclear and very
contentious in its implications. The major Scottish players (Kelvin, Maxwell) knew they were trying to salvage
their theology that was under siege from the growing forces of Scientific Naturalism and atheistic materialism.
Astonishingly they believed in the validity of their new physics because of the 'fact' that energy cannot be
created or destroyed by human beings guaranteed its physical reality. Ironically, Bertrand Russell saw through
the pessimistic fatalism of these ideas when he tied the utter devastation of the First World War to the arrogance
of man's triumph over industrialism.

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9 REVIEW SUMMARY
9.1 CONCLUSIONS
These debates illustrate the central role of religion in science during Victorian times and the contrasted images
of God acting in nature in the minds of these scientists, who are really theologians wrapping themselves in the
'Cloak of Number' i.e. mathematicians [crypto-Pythagoreans]. Those who were Traditionalists want their
Tribal God to be all powerful, always everywhere; making their ideas eternal but the Modernists want to
promote their own self-image, so their God can be viewed as a divine Engineer or even Architect (like them);
one who drew up the original plans and then left the Work-Crew to complete the job. As our civilization teeters
on the brink of global disaster, readers may judge for themselves here whether a suitable path into the future has
been chosen.
9.2 BOOK STRENGTHS
This book clearly shows how progress was made in energy physics in the Victoria era. Beginning with the real
mystery of the nature of heat, abstract concepts were invented and investigated by mathematics, with guesses
being made about heat's nature; typical of its time, heat was falsely assumed to be a fluid substance, called
caloric. The author strongly hints that Energy was a needed concept to provide the sense of the unification of
physics that still seemed fragmented between astronomical, mechanical and the new frontier of molecules. Any
'true' scientific theory was expected to conform to the widespread belief in progress through knowledge and
Truth was believed to be unitary. This was a factor in the origin of my own unitary physics theory: Universal
Electrons (UET): only one type of material existent: defined only by its ability to interact with other electrons.
9.3 BOOK WEAKNESSES
9.3.1 THE CONTINUUM GUESS
Smith accepts these revolutionary Energy-Men's belief that the world is better viewed from the perspective of
continuous matter possessed of kinetic energy than Newton's view of discrete particles interacting at a distance.
I started with Newton's views and they have held up well all through my life. Indeed, I see the Continuum
Hypothesis as being invented only to preserve the simplicity of the Calculus; the central mathematical method
learned in school and perfected through many years of fictitious, perfect physics exercises thereafter. The focus
on the interaction between two particles is sufficient to not only eliminate the redundant human idea of
(muscular) force but also to eliminate the fictitious idea of an intermediary, whether continuous (field) or
discrete (photon). Indeed, finite (discrete) mathematics has a broader range of applicability and maps directly to
finite physical measurements: unlike the fiction of Newton's "instantaneous" values like speed or momentum.
9.3.2 FIELD THEORY MATHEMATICS
Worse, several of these Victorian scientists were constraining their metaphysical solutions to secretly support
their deep personal religious beliefs like Faraday and Maxwell (they wanted a 'field' to be everywhere, like
God); I suspect Smith knows this but coyly keeps quiet to preserve the scientific reputations of two of
England's major scientific heroes. The very deep conservatism of mathematicians and academics is seen in the
persistence today of Field Theories in most areas of theoretical physics. Iron filings forming simple patterns
around a magnet are a weak indication of reality when they are just long-term persistent averages.
9.3.3 CONTEXTUAL HISTORY
Smith is an explicit spokesman for the contextual view of science that sees science not simply in terms of the
men of genius but as crucially contingent upon the cultural resources of the age in which the new ideas
appeared. In this case, the Victorian Age is crucial with its obsession with industrial machinery, social and
institutional networks and religious / political ideologies. This was true here in the mid-nineteenth century in
Northern England and Scotland, where the Cotton Empire began [see Divergence essay] and shipbuilding was
significant. Their early local audience included industrialists and engineers; through careful stage-management,
these ambitious men attracted national and international recognition that solidified their scientific credibility so
their were raised to the pantheon of science stars in their own lifetimes. This approach is difficult for most
people to appreciate, who rarely know enough about a 'Slice of the Past' to fully empathize with this choice.
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9.3.4 ACADEMIC HISTORY
Smith also retains the bad academic habit of quoting extensively from historic texts, whose language is no
longer as clear today as when first written; indeed, like so many academic historians, he has to give detailed
citations to any information he uses: this results in 40 pages of footnotes for about 320 pages of body text - a
very distracting overload. This would be much more valuable if Smith had elaborated in many of the meanings
of these references and leaving a few (only academics to check his references are accurate). His explanations
today, like the Stirling Air-Engine, are as opaque as those offered by William Thomson in 1850. Readers would
benefit more if Smith had bravely tried to offer a modern interpretation of more concepts from time to time to
clarify the story. His failure here tells me that Smith does not really understand the physics he is alluding to.
He also follows a temporal evolution, rather than the idea. Sadly, he has written this book for fellow scholars
and not the general public [hence my extended review for the general reader]; he omits broadening the context,
as the specialists know much of these details already. This limits the dispersion of the scholar's expertise into
the wider community, where broader awareness might evolve more usefully. Smith truly captures the drama of
these fiercely ambitious and competitive men building their personal reputations; it makes for a good story.
9.3.5 THE CLASS WAR
Smith, as an academic is too tolerant of the class snobbery of the Talking-Men (professors like him) in looking
down at the Dirty-Handed Men (the engineers). The academics, especially the mathematicians that have
dominated European science since Galileo, have tolerated short-term support from the engineers while they
wrote the textbooks that influenced the future course of science, so today, few professional physicists hear about
the valuable contributions of the engineers, like Rankine, while they learn the mathematics of Thermodynamics.
Smith also fails to give sufficient credit to the uneducated inventors, like Richard Trevithick (the pumping
engines) and George Stevenson (the first railways) that did far more to change the Victorian Era than the
mathematicians and theorists that he obsesses on [see my Techno essay].
9.4 BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
English science has produced a strong tradition of the History of Science but sadly, this has been ignored by
most professors who dominate British science, so that most scientists graduate with only the vaguest of
information about the history of their own science. This is true even for physics, with both a strong tradition of
academic study and the history of physics, like this book, but it will unfortunately be little read by another
generation of technocrats. There are many valuable vignettes of famous scientists here that would be valuable
to young scientists struggling to get their own new ideas accepted in a most conservative area of human
endeavor but Smith's approach to history seem so old fashioned so that his turgid writing style is quite off-
putting. I cannot recommend this book to the general reader who wants to understand more about the key idea
of energy. The book seems written for similar specialist scholars to Smith and perhaps post-graduates studying
for a PhD in the history of science or Victorian science. The tragedy of this personal competition was how
easily these abstract (scientific) ideas could be misused to boost military and killing technologies. Within one
generation; millions of young men would pay the price for these random innovations.

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9.5 APPENDIX.A - CLASSICAL PHYSICS
In selecting this book for review, I had hoped to expand the general awareness of this important Energy concept
beyond the scientists and engineers who now use it on a regular basis. Sadly, I was disappointed; as the author
knows that his target readers (fellow scholars) are well familiar with the formal definitions. For those who were
told that physics is "a tough subject" allow me to show you that (like Geometry) it is no more than a set of
related definitions of tightly defined concepts; as such these concepts were readily mapped to Newton's
mathematics that exploited Descartes' algebra ideas (each concept can be represented by a simple letter; note
underlined letters are vectors: a combination of number and direction in space). The physical model to grasp is
our game of billiards [see my essay Billiards].

9.5.1 MASS (M)

a) The quantity of matter in an object.
b) The resistance (inertia) to change in motion.
9.5.2 VELOCITY (V)
a) The displacement in location (X) in a unit of time (T); for a given direction (speed): V = X/T.
9.5.3 MOMENTUM (P)
a) The product of mass and the velocity for a given direction in space: P = M V.
9.5.4 FORCE (F)
a) The interaction that changes the motion of an object with mass, in a given direction: F = P / T.
9.5.5 WORK (W)
a) The product of a force and the displacement (X) along its direction: W = F X.
9.5.6 ENERGY (E)
a) The capacity available for doing useful work: E = Capacity(W).
9.5.7 ENTROPY (S)
a) The amount of energy unavailable for doing useful work.
b) A measure of the degree of disorder.

So, although the definition here of "Energy" is technically correct (in terms of physics) it can be readily
extended to the common intuition of capacity to produce change by simply recognizing that 'work' is just one
form of change that humans value when we invoke the idea of forces. An 'energetic' speaker may change the
minds of some of his listeners but he probably has not made any of them 'work' - unless they are slaves obeying
him. This ties back to the Greek origins of this word: energia (work) applied to humans who displayed a high
degree of mental or physical activity. Smith claims this word had several larger connotations: vigor is speech or
writing, intensity of action and the ability or capacity to produce an effort. The Old Athenians got this bit right.

9.6 APPENDIX.B - CLASSICAL THERMODYNAMICS

This section is added to clarify this difficult science that Smith failed to define as most of his readers are likely
to be specialists in this area but I believe this will prove helpful for the general (non-physics) readers.

Classical thermodynamics is the description of the states of thermodynamic systems at near-equilibrium, that
uses macroscopic, measurable properties. It is used to model exchanges of energy, work and heat based on the
following laws of thermodynamics (inspired by Newton's three laws of - mechanical motion). The qualifier
classical reflects the fact that it represents the first level of understanding of the subject as it developed in the
19th century (assuming Continuity) and describes the changes of a system in terms of macroscopic empirical
(large scale, and measurable) parameters. A microscopic interpretation (using the atomic model) of these
concepts was later provided by the development of statistical mechanics.

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9.6.1 STATISTICAL THERMODYNAMICS
The foundations of statistical thermodynamics were set out by physicists such as James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig
Boltzmann, Max Planck, Rudolf Clausius and J. Willard Gibbs. This is a very mathematical approach that
helped develop the quantized action concept, leading next to quantum mechanics. It is not discussed here.

9.7 APPENDIX.C - ENERGY ALTERNATIVES: <relationships = interactions; UET>

So, I have added a personal perspective that may help but WARNING: this is even more speculative than
Joule's ideas. The confusion around the concept of energy, reflected in this confused retelling of twisted tales,
illustrates what happens when religious ideas corrupt natural philosophy. That is, when the vagueness of
language, strongly influenced by human emotions and desires, meets the timeless rigidities of mathematics (as
used to constrain physical reality) then mental confusion results.

Electrons, as point particles, interact in pairs in relative motion, can only effect a finite amount of action along
their line of centers and can only produce a fixed amount of change (h = Planck's Constant of Action).

A = P dx ; dA = dx dP = h ; F = dP = d(mV) ; dW = F dx ; dE = dW = F dx = dx dP = dA :: dE = dA = h

Ensemble of N electrons have average energy = kT :: d(kT) = k dT = N dE = N h :: dT = Nh / k = 1. :: N = ??.

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