Lord Kelvin

That gives you a neat story about how it is that, say, multiple populations with different mixtures of alleles will evolve in a particular niche, but it doesn't really tell you how that whole story gets started.

How does life begin? And that was such a mystery in the 19th century that a lot of people who believed in Darwin's theory of evolution still believed in a creationist theory about the origins of life, like Lord Kelvin, because they could not see how such a system could get going in the first place.

I think that the answer really comes to us from Lynn Margulis, and from other thinkers in her tradition who noticed that when you look at life forms today, they actually consist of smaller life forms that make them up.

You know, we are not just these kind of indivisible selves, we also are colonies of cells.

The deflection of the needle, therefore, gives us a measure of the strength of the current.

But such an instrument is not delicate enough for the most refined experiments, and the improved form generally used is due to that prince of inventors, the late Lord Kelvin.

He originally devised it.

It is interesting to note, not for laboratory experiments, but for practical use as a telegraph instrument in connection with the early Atlantic cables.

Thus the slightest movement of the magnet was magnified into a considerable movement of the spot of light.

The beam of light from the mirror to the screen became, in fact, a long lever or pointer without weight and without friction.

The task of watching the rocking to and fro of the spot of light was found to be too nerve-wracking for the telegraph operators, and so Lord Kelvin improved upon his galvanometer in two ways.

He first of all managed to give it greater turning power so that, activated by the same current, the new instrument would work much more strongly than the older one.

If a copper wire were allowed to offer itself as a gateless conductor, it would equalize these variations of potential with serious injury to itself.

accordingly the rule is adopted of working the cable not directly as if it were a land-line but indirectly through condensers as the throb sent through such apparatus is but momentary the cable is at no risk from the strong currents which would course through it if it were permitted to be an open channel a serious error in working the first cables was in supposing that they required strong currents as in land lines of considerable length the very reverse is the fact mr charles bright in submarine telegraphs says mr latimer clark had the conductor of the eighteen sixty five and eighteen sixty six lines joined together at the newfoundland end thus forming an unbroken length of thirty seven hundred miles in circuit he then placed some sulphuric acid in a very small silver thimble with a fragment of zinc weighing a grain or two by this primitive agency he succeeded in conveying signals through twice the breadth of the atlantic ocean in little more than a second of time after making contact the deflections were not of a dubious character but full and strong from which it was manifest that an even smaller battery would suffice to produce somewhat similar effects at first an operating atlantic cable a mirror galvanometer was employed as a receiver the principle of this receiver has often been illustrated by a mischievous boy as with a slight and almost imperceptible motion of his hand he has used a bit of looking-glass to dart a ray of reflected sunlight across a wide street or a large room on the same plan the extremely minute motion of a galvanometer as it receives the successive pulsations of a message is magnified by a weightless lever of light so that the words are easily read by an operator fig sixty one this beautiful invention comes from the hands of sir william thomson now lord kelvin who more than any other electrician has made ocean telegraphy an established success in another receiver also of his design the siphon recorder he began by taking advantage of the fact observed long before by bows that a charge of electricity stimulates the flow of a liquid in its original form the ink-well into which the siphon dipped was insulated and charged to a high voltage by an influence machine the ink powerfully repelled was spurted from the siphon point to a moving strip of paper beneath figure sixty two it was afterward found better to use a delicate mechanical shaker which throws out the ink in minute drops as the cable current gently sways the siphon back and forth figure sixty three Minute as the current is which suffices for cable telegraphy, it is essential that the metallic circuit be not only unbroken, but unimpaired throughout.

No part of his duty has more severely taxed the resources of the electrician than to discover the breaks and leaks in his ocean cables.

One of his methods is to pour electricity, as it were, into a broken wire, much as if it were a narrow tube, and estimate the length of the wire, and consequently the distance from shore to the defect or break, by the quantity of current required to fill it.

On the other hand, the generally accepted theory of the second law of thermodynamics represents a different philosophical tendency, the tendency that considers change once made as irreparable.

aristotle's philosophy is a good example of that tendency in ancient times but it has appeared more recently especially in spencer's theory of evolution which it is interesting to note is hardly more than a statement of the second law of thermodynamics in philosophical terms since the manuscript was completed my attention was attracted by a quotation from a lecture by the great scientist lord kelvin in which a theory is suggested which is very similar to mine in its general outlines lord kelvin however does not work out the theory he suggests that life works through a reversal of the second law of thermodynamics and that living organisms especially animal life actually act the part of clerk maxwell's sorting demon lord kelvin however regards this as an indication of some suspension of the ordinary fiscal laws instead of seeking for the explanation of this reversal in these fiscal laws themselves to quote lord kelvin's own words it is conceivable that animal life might have the attribute of using the heat of surrounding matter at its natural temperature as a source of energy for a mechanical effect the influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific inquiry hitherto entered on its power of directing the motions of moving particles in the demonstrated daily miracle of our human free will and in the growth of generation after generation of plants from a single seed are infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms here the suggestion is obvious that the phenomena of life operates as clerk maxwell's supposed sorting team through reversing the second law of thermodynamics and utilizing the unavailable or reserve energy of matter only lord kelvin instead of deriving this from the ordinary physical laws immediately concluded that some mysterious vital force must be in operation under my theory this reversal can be explained on the pure basis of the theory of probability it is also to be noted that the theory which i suggest in this work solves not only the biological problem of reserve energy but also certain astronomical paradoxes in connection with the theory of the structure of the universe and its evolution the latter part of the work which deals with the theory of the reversibility of time and the psychological aspect of the second law of thermodynamics itself is a purely speculative section but taking more of the metaphysical than of the scientific however even in that section it is to be hoped that there will be found a basis for putting the theory of the nature of time on a scientific basis and for taking it finally outside of the domain of metaphysics at the end of the work a number of objections to my theory are stated in order to show what objections can be adduced i do not attempt to answer these arguments but for the sake of fairness to the reader simply state them and leave them unanswered so that the reader may decide for himself all the pros and cons of the question and come to a more unbiased conclusion at first i hesitated to publish my theory of the reversibility of the universe but i was encouraged on discovering the quotation from lord kelvin above mentioned so that now knowing that this is not the first time that it has been suggested that life is a reversal of the second law of thermodynamics i have decided to publish the work and give my theory to the world to be accepted or rejected as the case may be william james sidus january sixth nineteen twenty

End of Preface Chapter 1 The Reverse Universe

among the physical laws it is a general characteristic that there is a reversibility in time that is should the whole universe trace back the various positions that bodies in it have passed through in a given interval of time but in the reverse order to that in which these positions actually occurred then the universe in this imaginary case would still obey the same laws to test reversibility we may imagine that we may call the reverse universe that is to say another an imaginary universe in which the positions of all bodies at various moments of time are the same as in our real universe in which those positions occur at the same respective intervals of time but in the reverse order to assist in imagining this reverse universe we may remind ourselves that when we look in a mirror the imaginary world that we see in that mirror corresponds in every detail to the world we are in with the exception that one dimension of space occurs in the reverse order namely the direction perpendicular to the plane of the mirror if now we conceive of time as a sort of additional dimension of the universe then our reverse universe would be one in which there was a similar reversal in that dimension leaving the three dimensions of space unaltered or to put it another way the series of images produced by running a motion picture reel backwards would give exactly the impression of such a reverse universe with this auxiliary imaginary universe our test of the reversibility of any given physical law or process would be whether that law holds good whether that process still subsists in the reverse universe in order to see that in any case we may first find out how to translate any physical occurrence into the corresponding occurrence in our reverse universe to start with all positions in space remain absolutely the same in the reverse universe as in the real universe intervals of time however remain the same in magnitude but are reversed in in other words though the absolute amount of an interval of time remains unchanged it is necessary in translating into terms of the reverse universe to replace before by after and vice versa the path of a moving body will remain the same in the reverse universe because all the positions which constitute that path will remain unchanged since however the positions are reached in the reverse order of time the body moves along the path in the reverse direction the absolute amount of corresponding intervals of space and time in this motion remaining unchanged it follows that all velocities must in the reverse universe be the same in amount but exactly reversed in direction we come to a problem of greater difficulty in considering what becomes of acceleration acceleration is the rate of change of velocity with respect to time if to make the question simpler we assume uniform acceleration then the acceleration of a body is equal to the difference of velocity divided by the interval of time required to produce this difference if for example in any interval of time t the velocity a is changed to the velocity b the acceleration vertically represented would be b minus a divided by t in the corresponding motion of the reverse universe in the interval of time t the velocity changes from minus b to minus a so that the acceleration is minus a minus minus b divided by t b a divided by t in other words the acceleration of a body remains unchanged in the reverse universe both in amount and in direction in translation into terms of the reverse universe the above reason assumes that the acceleration of the body is uniform

Your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.

Lord Kelvin.

So when I look at your backdrop, I see one of your books there, Marketing with a Book, right? So, and you would have less credibility in front of a prospective author if you didn't also have written several great books, right? You know, if you're out there trying to sell, well, this is why I think that you should publish a book with Indie.

Yeah.

It's a very abstract quantity, but it helps with understanding.

Because of that understanding, because of Boltzmann's work and Lord Kelvin's work, not only did we improve on Carnot's engine, we managed to make much faster engines that do fun things, and at the same time, managed to create engines that take us from here to the moon.

So how confident are we? We're pretty smart.

We've done so well.

And I won't get into that right now because it's quite esoteric, but basically all of our science is a lie too.

I started with Nikola Tesla and then I spent the next five years literally reading all of the actual works of the Victorian greats, guys like Maxwell, J.J. Thompson, Lord Kelvin, Humphreys, you know, Faraday, pretty much everyone.

So Oliver Lodge, all those guys, I read all of their books and I began to understand that even our science was a liar and that you know i had during that first two years is when i actually became a muslim and i said okay islam is definitely the truth the way they're attacking it even back then made me think you know what you know there's definitely good and evil out there and whatever if there's absolute evil there has to be absolute good and of course the dark side would be aware of what's good and they can't seem to help themselves so they would attack it with all vehemence and aggression what is the one faith out there that is being attacked and i was like i thought about it i was like huh and i was like oh wait a minute it's islam in fact it's attacked and degraded so much that you don't even consider to think about it it's not even thought of that's the kind of black magic they've worked over that And all I did was I read the Quran and the first chapter I read was the one about Mary, which talked about the story of Jesus.

And I was like, wow, Jesus actually makes sense now.