Royal Institution, UK. Rutherford rises to speak. He’s relieved to see old Lord Kelvin asleep in the audience. Kelvin was the leading proponent of chemical fire, which would fuel heat from within our planet. This would contradict an Earth age of more than a few million or even thousands of years. And therefore also contradict Darwin’s theory. Rutherford, however, discovered that radioactivity can be continuously emitted from materials, thus constantly producing heat. However, at the critical point, Kelvin, hearing his name, wakes up and jumps, and Rutherford makes up a story: “…Kelvin had limited the age of the Earth [to 25 million years] assuming no new source of energy had been discovered.”
