Lord Kelvin: Unit 2 Assignment 1

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energy to be converted into thermal energy. He used the latest developments in math to calculate how long it would have taken the Earth to cool to a life sustaining temperature, and from these calculations and observations, he assumed that Earth could not be more than 100 million years old.

Geologists and biologists were arguing against this assumption with strong evidence and observations of their own, suggesting that the Earth was actually hundreds of millions of years old. Geologists theorized this with evidence found in layers of rocks while biologists required an explanation or account of the gradual evolution of life that could be observed on Earth and from the evidence uncovered by geologists. However, as previously stated, Lord Kelvin rejected these observations and the debate continued until the late 1890s. Though Kelvin’s theory was challenged in 1895 by John Perry, who suggested the concept of convection, Kelvin’s theory still remained a more popular theory until ...

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