If to-day you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the æther or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard… - Arthur Eddington

What is the source of heat which the sun and the stars are continually squandering? The answer given is almost unanimous... the gravitational energy converted as the star steadily contracts. ...Lord Kelvin showed that this hypothesis, due to Helmholtz, necessarily dates the birth of the sun about 20,000,000 years ago; and he made strenuous efforts to induce geologists and biologists to accommodate... But... outrageous violations of this limit have prevailed. ...Sir 's theory of the earth-moon system, to the present Lord Raleigh's ...age of terrestrial rocks from occluded helium, and to all modern discussions of the statistical equilibrium of the stellar system. No one seems to have any hesitation... in carrying back the history of the earth long before the supposed date of formation of the solar system... in some cases... this appears... justified by experimental evidence... difficult to dispute. Lord Kelvin's date of the creation of the sun is treated with no more respect than Archbishop Ussher's.

The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. … if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

The mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions.