Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Just over 200 years ago, in June 1824, William Thomson, who was to become Lord Kelvin, was born.From humble beginnings, he was appointed, in 1846, at the unlikely age of 22, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, a position he held for the following 53 years [1,2].He went on to become one of the greatest of all classical physicists, making many key advances in the fields of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and precision measurement.Among his many achievements, he, along with Rudolf Clausius and others, became one of the founding fathers of the discipline of thermodynamics.Papers he published in the late 1840s to mid-1850s [3] laid the foundations of primary thermometry (through, for example, positing that heat was not conserved but energy was, and that there was such a thing as 'absolute temperature' independent of the physical properties of any specific substance) [4], foundations that practicing thermometrists rely on today, whether they know it or not.Kelvin's name has long been associated with primary thermometry, certainly before his death [5], and it is fitting that in the modern international system of measurement units (the SI) the unit of thermodynamic temperature is named 'the kelvin' in his honour [6].For many years the kelvin was defined in terms of a fixed value of the triple point of water [6].However, in May 2019, the kelvin, the kilogram, the ampere and the mole were redefined in terms of fixed values of fundamental constants.For the kelvin, that constant was the Boltzmann constant, k, whose value was fixed to be 1.380649 × 10 -23 J K -1 with no uncertainty.In the
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7124309685