For the age of the Universe, nineteenth century science would have best relied on the estimates of the geologists, who required thousands of rather than the hundreds of millions of years estimated by Kelvin as an upper limit. And any scientific apprai...
For the age of the Universe, nineteenth century science would have best relied on the estimates of the geologists, who required thousands of rather than the hundreds of millions of years estimated by Kelvin as an upper limit. And any scientific appraisal of the Universe would also have had to take into account two great biological concepts formulated in the nineteenth century: Darwin's Theory of Evolution (1859) and Mendel's Laws of Heredity (1865). It would also have done well to keep in mind the discovery of Brownian Motion (1827) by the botanist Robert Brown.