Lord Kelvin

"Cold didn't exist at the time. Cold was the absence of heat, like darkness was the absence of light." I contemplate Bill's words as I try to conceptualize what he was trying to tell me. These days, he'd explained, cold and shadows exist in and of themselves. It was hard to imagine a world where this wasn't the case... I breathe out while surveying the snowy peaks, and a jet of steam shoots out of my mouth before vanishing into the air. Although I was relieved to leave the bruised darkness of the canyon, the cold wind blowing outside almost made me regret my decision to get some fresh air. In front of me, a completely absorbed Bill continues his experiments on the nature of cold. I watch him freeze unsuspecting little mushes, then gradually liberate them from their icy prisons.

Although I don't fully understand his wild ideas, Bill told me that the cold here was being generated by something, and that it's artificial. Usually, an Oasis is created around a strong idea anchored to a place, and he'd admitted that the idea of cold was strong enough here to act as a repellent for other ideas swept along by the Tumult. But what Bill was saying was that this wasn't a natural phenomenon, that something was keeping the cold stuck here. If I could have chosen what idea would get stuck, I'd have preferred "pleasantness" or something similar! Something that didn't freeze your butt off, at least... Bill strokes his beard to help him think, as well as to dust off the ice crystals forming in it. He looks at me, confused, as if something's missing or not quite right.

Source William Thomson, awarded the title of 1st Baron Kelvin in 1892, was an Irish-born British mathematician, physicist and engineer. Specializing in thermodynamics, he was the first human to precisely calculate the temperature of absolute zero, the theoretical lowest temperature possible. But Sir Thomson's contributions went beyond his work on temperature. He helped to design underwater telegraph systems and contributed to the expeditions to lay these cables under the sea. He also came up with hypotheses on the nature of atoms, theorizing that an atom could be a vortex in the aether.

William Thomson, awarded the title of 1st Baron Kelvin in 1892, was an Irish-born British mathematician, physicist and engineer. Specializing in thermodynamics, he was the first human to precisely calculate the temperature of absolute zero, the theoretical lowest temperature possible. But Sir Thomson's contributions went beyond his work on temperature. He helped to design underwater telegraph systems and contributed to the expeditions to lay these cables under the sea. He also came up with hypotheses on the nature of atoms, theorizing that an atom could be a vortex in the aether.

SUBHASH