—————< 
SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
SECTION A.—MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 
THE NEW IDEAS IN METEOROLOGY. 
ADDRESS BY 
G. C. SIMPSON, C.B.E., D.Sc., LL.D., F.R.S 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
) 
Berore taking up the main thread of my address I should like to refer 
in a few words to the loss which mathematics and physics sustained on 
February 3rd last in the death of Oliver Heaviside. It was given to few 
men to know Heaviside personally, and to still fewer to know him inti- 
mately, yet his death was mourned throughout the world. This is not 
the place for me to give any account of his great contributions to the 
science of electricity, for they are familiar to every member of Section A. 
I would, however, like to refer to one aspect of Heaviside’s work. 
Heaviside commenced his electrical work on the commercial side, but he 
retired and devoted himself to science for its own sake. Realising 
throughout the immense commercial value of his work, he took out no 
patents and asked for no remuneration, but gave to humanity discoveries 
the money value of which cannot be estimated, so vast is it. In honouring 
Heaviside we honour one who brought great honour to British science. 
The first quarter of the twentieth century will always be remarkable 
for the great advances made in science. In our own particular branch 
the advance has probably been the most startling and has appealed very 
strongly to the popular imagination. In mathematics we have had a 
little-known and even less-understood branch of pure mathematics applied 
to physical problems with results which have revolutionised our whole 
conception of the universe in which we live. In astronomy we have had 
described to us an evolution of the heavenly bodies as real and as domin- 
ating as the evolution which the previous century revealed in the animal 
kingdom. In physics the progress made has been phenomenal. At the 
beginning of the century, it is true, we had been introduced to the electron, 
to Réntgen rays and to radio-activity ; Planck was also writing on the 
laws of radiation; but no one realised the powerful tools which these 
_ phenomena were going to put into the hands of physicists. These tools 
have, however, been used, and not least by our own countrymen, to dig 
deep into Nature’s secrets, even into the atom itself, so that now.we. are 
able to visualise the component parts of an atom, which itself is a structure 
far removed from our powers of perception. ; cam “er 
These advances have been the subject of a series of. Presidential 
addresses before this section and have given rise to.many interesting and 
fruitful discussions at our meetings ; they are almost common knowledge. 
_. Meteorology, although a child of applied mathematics and physics, 
has hardly been touched by the epoch-making discoveries in the house of 
its parents. .The quantum has, found. na place in. our theories of. the 
