The Incredible Lord Rayleigh

Abstract

Lord Rayleigh, who worked at the RI for 15 years as well as in his baronial home in Terling, Essex, is regarded by most scientists as one of the cleverest and perspicacious of all classical physicist. He was extraordinarily gifted both as an experimentalist and as a theoretician. It was he who first explained why the sky is blue, and why sunsets are red. He also discovered the noble gas, argon, which earned him the first-ever Nobel Prize (as a British scientist). As a young man, suffering from tuberculosis, he sailed with his wife up the Nile, during the course of which he wrote the definitive text (Vol 1) of the ‘Theory of Sound’: he solved his problems as they arose. He had no access to a library. The location of earthquakes and earth tremors are nowadays greatly assisted by his theoretical studies