It all started back in the day. The King began granting lordships to persons who he believed had contributed an important and lasting contribution to the Crown. One's lordship came with, presumably, a manor, including moat, stables, serfs, villeins, cottars, bordars, freeholders, copyholders, and a full compliment of picturesque peasant girls with ripped bodices (Constable painting optional).
The famous-type person being famous for actually having accomplished something and not for simply booting with a bunch of Rutger's coeds on MTV, the Lord would inevitably wind up in the textbooks.
Here's where the trouble starts.
You might think if your name was, say, Lab Kitty, you would become Lord Kitty upon becoming a Lord. Alas, no. Your lordness moniker is usually based on a place. Perhaps it is the place from whence you hailed or some place you fancied. Maybe it was the place you once enjoyed some kick-ass cider or lost your virginity. Your call.
So it is the guy who discovered thermodynamics was John Strutt, but the textbooks all call him Rayleigh. Unless that was Kelvin, whose real name was William Muny. Wait, that can't be right. Was Rutherford Lord Bumford, or was it Dunford who was Lord Sutherford? And which one is Lord Byron?
Gah. The whole thing just angries up the brain.
Well, LabKitty is here to help. Inspired by the recent royal wedding (I think there was one of those), I've decided it's high time somebody sorts out the Lords business. That somebody is me. I've combed the Lords of Science out of the textbooks and organized them into a handy field guide. Each entry provides the man's title, his given name, and a brief bio including the accomplishments what landed him a title. Oh, and a picture if Wikipedia had one I could steal. The selections skew Brit for obvious reasons, although the King eventually starting tapping talent elsewhere (but not America -- apparently that whole rebellion business left some ruffled feathers).
Whether doing your physics homework home alone or arguing with the other punters down at the pub, keep this guide handy for all of your Lord spotting needs.
Lord Kelvin
William Thompson
It's not everyone who gets a temperature scale named after them. Well, you do if you're William Thompson. (I guess you also do if you're Gabriel Fahrenheit. Not sure where I was headed with that. Let's move on.)
For those of you thinking: He added 273 to Celsius and got famous?? I coulda dunn that! -- here's the rest of the story.
Lord Kelvin was born William Thompson in 1824 Scotland. He entered Glasgow University at age ten. In 1841 he matriculated to Cambridge and by 1846 he's back at GU as a professor. He would spend the next 50 years there diligently working on the leading problems in contemporary physics and engineering. Thompson made fundamental contributions to mechanics and thermodynamics, including the creation of the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature. Working with the likes of James Joule and Sadi Carnot, he worked to overturn the Caloric Theory which gave rise to our modern understanding of the relationship between mechanical work and heat (now codified as the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics). He then turned his attention to electricity, proving himself to be equally skilled in practical as well as theoretical matters. Thompson developed devices for the precise measurement of current, worked on power station design at Niagara falls, and invented one of the first practical telegraph keys. His interest in telegraphy would consume most of his later career, with Thompson playing a central role in the laying of the first transatlantic cable. Thompson did everything from design the cable, to analyze its trajectory, to go along on the crossing and help throw the damn thing over the side.
When ennobled for his achievements, Thompson took the name of a river that ran past his laboratory. William Thompson of Glasgow become Lord Kelvin of textbooks. Thus do we speak of Kelvin material, Kelvin waves, the Kelvin transform, Kelvin bridge, Kelvin divider, Kelvin theorem, Kelvin sensing, Kelvin instability, Kelvin mechanism, Kelvin luminosity, Kelvin Arizona, and, of course, the Kelvin.
Lord Rayleigh
John Strutt
Good night nurse, is there anything this guy didn't do? Why is the sky blue? Rayleigh scattering. Why does an earthquake quake? Rayleigh waves. What are the components of a random vector? Rayleigh distribution. How do you extract eigenvalues? Rayleigh quotient. What limits optical resolution? Rayleigh criterion. Rayleigh fading? Rayleigh flow? Rayleigh asteroid? You get the idea.
About the only thing Rayleigh didn't get named after him was a sammich.
Winner of the Royal Medal, the Matteucci Medal, the Copley Medal, the Rumford Medal. And, oh yes, a little thing called the Nobel prize (for the discovery of argon in 1904). However, Lord Rayleigh was born John Strutt. He inherited his lordship from his grandmother, Lady Rayleigh. The first Baron Rayleigh was Strutt's great uncle Charles Fitzgerald, and the 2nd was someone Willypete won't tell me about for some reason. Strutt was the 3rd. He passed his title on to his son, the 4th Baron of Rayleigh; it's currently held by Strutt's great-grandson, the sixth Baron Rayleigh, assuming I got the math right.
All of whom seem to have a proclivity for attending Oxford. Which is not surprising, all things considered. I imagine negotiations with the admissions folks are a straightforward affair when dad is a baron. What's that? You say my SAT's aren't up to scratch? Well, good day to you, sir! Within a fortnight you may expect our roundheads to be assailing the Oxford parapets!
It's possible LabKitty does not really have a firm grasp on the whole Lordship thing.
Ernest Rutherford
Lord Nelson
Discoverer of the nucleus, carry-outer of the first nuclear transmutation, mentor of physics big-shots from San Francisco to Stockholm, Nobel laureate. And, yes, a Lord. Lord Rutherford of Nelson to be exact, taking the name of his humble hometown back in New Zealand. (Not to be confused with the other Lord Nelson, the one who didn't come back from Trafalgar.)
Rutherford was a bear of a man, with a heart as big as the moon and as warm as bath water. Rumor has it he would lead the chaps in boisterous off-kilter renditions of "Onward Christian Soldiers" as they headed into the dank basement of the Cavendish for 14 hours of scintillation counting. There he sussed out the deepest secrets of the atom, and did so using apparatus not much more complicated than kitchen utensils and Bank of England sealing wax. Heutzutage, physics experiments don't fit in a single country.
That being said, the man was not universally loved. Some found his laboratory management to be heavy handed and tyrannical. Theorists generally got the worst of it. Rutherford had a burning contempt for mathematics (bless his heart), this at a time when quantum mechanics was turning the old physics of pulleys and inclined planes into 5-dimensional Sudoku. Bohr got a pass as far as Rutherford was concerned, although that may have had more to do with his soccer prowess than his physics. Dirac -- who did to physics what John Cage did to music -- got a cold shoulder (I imagine Rutherford hearing Charlie Brown's teacher anytime Dirac spoke). Robert Oppenheimer spent some time under Rutherford as a postdoc and the experience left him so frazzled he tried to poison one of his labmates.
And then there was Albert Einstein, whose spat with Rutherford was amicable but philosophically deeper. When Einstein's E = mc^2 predicted prodigious energy existed inside matter, the father of atomic physics famously dismissed the possibility of such energy being released as "moonshine." The first large-scale release was demonstrated in the New Mexico desert in 1945, the Manhattan Project (ironically lead by Oppenheimer) turning Lord Nelson's beloved atom into an engine of slaughter. Moonshine, indeed.
Rutherford would not live to see himself proved wrong. He died in 1937, after falling from a tree he was pruning.
Lord Brain
Russell Brain
What are the odds? Just like Lou Gehrig getting Lou Gehrig's disease, Walter Russell Brain happens to take up neuroscience as a vocation, then makes important enough contributions to clinch a lordship, making him one Lord Brain.
Brain trained at Oxford and went on to a notable career in neurology. He wrote the classic Brain's Diseases of the Nervous System, now in something like its 13th edition. He founded the leading neurology journal of the day called (wait for it) Brain. He also discovered the quadripedal reflex, which I think is that thing secretaries do after a few jello shooters whenever Walk Like an Egyptian comes on the jukebox. All this got Brain a baronet in 1954 and a baroness in 1962, the latter now held by his son Christopher.
Imaging trolling the crowded aisles of SFN with your lanyarded placard boldly stenciled LORD BRAIN. I picture the baron walking with white glove'd hands clasped neatly behind his back. And a top hat. The nerd sea parting around him like the Titanic slicing through the dark North Atlantic, lest they suffer the sharp retort of his walking stick. As he ambles to your poster, a hush falls over the assembled crowd. There he stands enigmatic as the Sphinx, silently scanning up and down as he adjusts his pince-nez, your data mere inches from his nose. After what seems like eons he turns to you and gives an approving nod. "Bully" Lord Brain says winkingly, cigarette holder waggling between his clenched teeth. Then he turns and makes for the booth babes.
The guy must have gotten enough vendor swag to fill a wheelbarrow.
Count Rumford
Ben Rumford
Although we have by no means exhausted the collection of scientists who have been granted lordships, the remainder aren't exactly household names. (I hesistate to use the label "lesser nobility" but, c'mon, none of these guys even have a blog. How important can they be?) More to the point, like Lord Brain they didn't get the memo about choosing your title to maximize confusion. Howard Florey became Lord Florey after improving penicilin manufacturing and saving 500,000 lives or whatever. Alexander Todd gets a Nobel prize for his work on nucleotides and becomes Lord Todd. Deserving chaps, we would all agree, but their stationery does not require exposition.
The good news is other monarchies have also been doing violence to the textbooks. Which brings us to Germany. Bavaria to be specific. It is the 18th centruy. The field of thermodynamics is still in short pants and the Caloric Theory of Heat is all the rage. This stated heat is a physical fluid called "caloric." When something hots up, it's 'cause caloric flowed into it. For example, when you attempt to extract your Pop Tart from the toaster, caloric would flow from the toaster through the fork and into your hand. Ergo do you "drop it like it's hot," as the commoners say.
Enter Ben Thompson.
As happens to this day, the State insists Science whore itself out to the defense industry if it doesn't want to enjoy the joy of defunding. So it is that Thompson comes to be studying the construction of cannons for the Bavarian Army. Oversimplifying the art of cannonade construction, the process involves taking a cylindrical hunk of pig iron and boring a hole through it. Viola! Cannon.
Natch, the pig iron heats up during boring. Thompson notes that no matter how much is bored, the thing still heats up. That is to say, one just can't seem to get all of the caloric out. Thompson concludes that there just can't be right. Cannon boring leads him to question the contemporary understanding of thermodynamics, and, yes, I shall ignore your tittering upon seeing the close juxtaposition of "boring" and "thermodynamics."
Eventually Thompson and others would figure out that heat isn't "stuff," it's a process -- a jiggling of atoms. More jiggle = more heat. But as wrong-headed science goes, the caloric theory wasn't that bad. It made many predictions that fit observations, and it eventually got people onto the right track. And unlike wrong-headed science such as phrenology or geocentrism, the caloric theory of heat didn't get anyone killed. Nobody was enslaved or shunned on account of having a mis'shaped noggin because of caloric. The Inquisition didn't toss anyone into an iron maiden because of caloric. No school teachers were fired for teaching it.
Science corrected itself. It's what science does. The end.
Oh, and Benjamin Thompson became Count Rumford (Reichsgraf Rumford, technically, of the Holy Roman Empire), taking the name of Rumford, New Hampshire (a story for another time, perhaps). The end.
Image Credits: Wikipedia.
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