Science and the Public 351and progressive values, and linked to the industrialists of northern Brit-
ain, energy physics was founded by a “North British” group composed of
Glasgow professor of natural philosophy William Thomson (1824–1907),
Scottish natural philosophers James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) and Pe-
ter Guthrie Tait (1831–1901), and the engineers Henry Fleeming Jenkin
(1833–1885) and William Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872). These men
found the perceived anti- Christian materialism of the metropolitan scien-
tifi c naturalists quite distasteful and they were prepared to enter into an
alliance with Cambridge Anglicans to undermine the authority of Huxley
and his allies. They promoted a natural philosophy (their preferred term
for a scientifi c study of nature) in harmony with, though not subservient
to, Christian belief.
Energy physics was an indispensable component of this natural phi-
losophy, since, as constructed by the North British Physicists, it posited
that energy fl ow had a direction, whether expressed as progression or dis-
sipation, which pointed to a universe governed by basic laws ordained by
a creative, divine being. Believing that the core doctrine of materialism
was reversibility, the North British Physicists denied the scientifi c validity
of the concept of a purely dynamical or mechanical system in which there
was no difference between running forward or backward. They resisted
the efforts of John Tyndall to deploy the doctrine of the conservation of
energy in the service of scientifi c naturalism within the domain of the
physical sciences.^43 Tyndall maintained that the fi xed quantity of energy
in the universe meant that the mechanism of nature remained closed to
all external (read supernatural) interference. In the case of Thomson’s de-
bate with Huxley on the age of Earth in the late sixties, the science of en-
ergy was harnessed to disrupt the authority of scientifi c naturalism within
the life sciences. The laws of thermodynamics were used by Thomson to
raise questions about vast time scale required by Darwinian evolution.^44
Thomson’s rejection of Darwinian evolution, with its randomness, was
bound up with his commitment to a process that was ordered, law- like,
and subject to divine guidance and control. During a heated dispute as to
who was the founder of the modern dynamical theory of heat, with Tyn-
dall backing Mayer, and Thomson and Tait supporting Joule, the crucial
issue of religion and scientifi c authority came out into the open. In the
Philosophical Magazine, a periodical for professional scientists, Tyndall ob-
jected that Thomson and Tait had aired their priority dispute in the pages
of a Christian journal like Good Words. Tyndall charged that Thomson and
Tait had acted against the “interests” and “dignity” of science by “taking
diffi cult and disputed points... into such a court” as the one composed of
readers of Good Words. Tyndall rejected the appeal to a court of the people