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Notes -
I always fondly remember this (partly apocryphal) story told by my Physics teacher of Lord Kelvin's famous speech to the Royal Society in which he declared that we were on the cusp of completing a full understanding of the physical universe, except for two small clouds on the horizon: the relative motion of the ether with respect to massive objects, and Maxwell-Boltzmann's theorem on the equipartition of energy.
Of course these two issues would end up requiring the invention of special relativity and quantum mechanics to solve, and with them the undoing of classical physics as a whole and with it the sense of certainty physicists of 1900 had about their discoveries (but not Kelvin himself, despite often being quoted as such).
Very interestingly if you ask GPT about what those two clouds were you will get a vast variety of answers including references to UV-catastrophe and black body radiation despite him making no reference to those.
And that's because it's just a common misconception even scholars repeat uncritically.
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