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Age of Earth Kelvin caricatured by Spy for Vanity Fair, 1897. Kelvin made an early physics-based estimation of the age of Earth. Given his youthful work on the figure of Earth and his interest in heat conduction, it is no surprise that he chose to investigate Earth's cooling and to make historical inferences of Earth's age from his calculations.
In 1862, the physicist William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin published calculations that fixed the age of Earth at between 20 million and 400 million years. He assumed that Earth had formed as a completely molten object, and determined the amount of time it would take for the near-surface temperature gradient to decrease to its present value.
In 1862, Lord Kelvin calculated the age of the Earth at between 20 million and 400 million years by assuming that Earth had formed as a completely molten object, and determined the amount of time it would take for the near-surface to cool to its present temperature. Since uniformitarianism required a much older Earth, there was a contradiction.
Heat and early estimate of Earth's age. Based on calculations of Earth's cooling rate, which assumed constant conductivity in the Earth's interior, in 1862 William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, estimated the age of the Earth at 98 million years, which contrasts with the age of 4.5 billion years obtained in the 20th century by radiometric dating.
Vortex theory of the atom. The vortex theory of the atom was a 19th-century attempt by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) to explain why the atoms recently discovered by chemists came in only relatively few varieties but in very great numbers of each kind. Based on the idea of stable, knotted vortices in the ether or aether, it contributed an ...
In 1913 Holmes was on the staff of Imperial College, when he published his famous book The Age of the Earth in which he argued strongly in favour of the use of radiometric dating methods rather than methods based on geological sedimentation or cooling of the Earth (many people still clung to Lord Kelvin's calculations of less than 100 million ...
The heat death paradox, also known as thermodynamic paradox, Clausius' paradox, and Kelvin's paradox, [1] is a reductio ad absurdum argument that uses thermodynamics to show the impossibility of an infinitely old universe. It was formulated in February 1862 by Lord Kelvin and expanded upon by Hermann von Helmholtz and William John Macquorn Rankine.
Geologic time scale. The geologic time scale, proportionally represented as a log-spiral with some major events in Earth's history. A megaannus (Ma) represents one million (10 6) years. The geologic time scale or geological time scale ( GTS) is a representation of time based on the rock record of Earth. It is a system of chronological dating ...