To appreciate Kelvin's achieve-ments, we must take ourselves back to 1841 when, at the age of 16, he pub-fished his first paper. This rescued a neglected work by Fourier, and showed that the instability of Fourier series close to sharp boundaries does not prevent their use in studying the flow of heat. Thus the physics of con-tinuous media was born. Although the relationship between heat and energy was then unclear (and incompatible theories of "caloric" were in circula-tion), Kelvin took to heart Fourier's message that one can describe in ma-thematics the behaviour of heat with-out knowing what heat is.
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