The mathematical physicist and engineer William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (1824 1904) is best known for devising the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature and for his work on the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The lectures in this collection demonstrate an attempt by Baron Kelvin to formulate a physical model for the existence of ether. This concept of a medium for light propagation became prominent in the late nineteenth century, arising from the combination of Maxwell's equations stating that light is an electromagnetic wave with the demands of Newtonian physics that light must...

The essential introduction to the revolutionary physics of Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Peter Guthrie Tait.