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Updated: May 12, 2025
It is only potent where inorganic energy is mechanically 'available' to use Lord Kelvin's term that is to say, is either potentially or actually in process of transfer and transformation. In other words, life can generate no trace of energy, it can only guide its transformation."
Thus the vortex theory of atoms took form in Lord Kelvin's mind, and its expression gave the world what many philosophers of our time regard as the most plausible conception of the constitution of matter hitherto formulated. It is only a theory, to be sure; its author would be the last person to claim finality for it. "It is only a dream," Lord Kelvin said to me, in referring to it not long ago.
Adopting Lord Kelvin's hypothesis, we shall find that, in order that we may receive from the stars the amount of light we have designated, this system need not extend beyond some 5000 light-years. But this hypothesis probably overestimates the thickness of the stars in space. It does not seem probable that there are as many as 1,000,000,000 stars within the sphere of 3300 light-years.
"Look at that made in a moment and gone in a moment and yet on exactly the same principle, it gives one a dim idea of the difference between time and eternity. After all it's only another example of Kelvin's theory of vortices. Nebulæ, and asteroids, and planet-rings, and smoke-rings are really all made on the same principle."
Lord Kelvin's claim for a recognition of the fact that in organic nature scientific thought is compelled to accept the idea of some kind of directive power, and his statement that biologists are coming once more to a firm acceptance of a vital principle, drew from several distinguished men of science retorts heated enough to prove beyond a doubt that the gulf between the two main divisions of evolutionists is as wide to-day as it was when Butler wrote.
The advantage of Professor Tait's apparatus is its manageableness and the certainty with which the desired result can be produced. Before Lord Kelvin's interested observation it threw out rings of various sizes, which moved straight across the room at varying rates of speed, according to the initial impulse, and which behaved very strangely when coming in contact with one another.
The assertion, as a broad truth, left one's mind in some doubt of its bearing, for order and beauty seemed to be associated also in the mind of a crystal, if one's senses were to be admitted as judge; but the historian had no interest in the universal truth of Pearson's or Kelvin's or Newton's laws; he sought only their relative drift or direction, and Pearson went on to say that these conceptions must stop: "Into the chaos beyond sense-impressions we cannot scientifically project them."
Since Lord Kelvin's estimate was made, his claim that the final crust of the earth could not have formed until the mass was solid throughout, or at least until a honeycomb of solid matter had been bridged up from centre to circumference, has gained pretty general acceptance.
But a dogma of Necessity would be more tolerable than a doctrine of Chance. In Lord Kelvin's address, to which reference has been made, he declared his conviction that "directive power" was "an article of belief which science compelled him to accept." There was nothing, he said, between such a belief and the acceptance of the theory of a fortuitous concourse of atoms.
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