A 150-year-old theory about an otherworldly shape proposed by Lord Kelvin, one of history’s greatest physicists, has finally been put to the test — and his conjecture is now in doubt.
In 1871, William Thomson, more commonly known as Lord Kelvin — a famed British physicist who made key contributions to electromagnetic theory, thermodynamics, navigation and the absolute temperature system that bears his name — proposed a theory about a strange hypothetical shape, which he called an isotropic helicoid.
