Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/417

Rh It is certainly a remarkable fact that with a much smaller number of working men of science than Germany or the United States, Great Britain is able to produce so many great leaders. Lord Rayleigh was president of the Montreal meeting twenty-five years ago and Lord Kelvin president of the section for mathematics and physics. It might be supposed that Great Britain could not again furnish two physicists of the same class, but at Winnipeg Sir J. J. Thomson presided over the association and Professor Rutherford over the section, both recipients of Nobel prizes and commanding the course of modern physics.

In his address Professor Thomson referred first to the local conditions of the meeting and the great development of Manitoba, reminding his hearers that even the enterprise and energy of the people and the richness of the country could not have accomplished this without the resources coming from the labors of men of science. After discussing certain educational problems, including the dangers from the examination system and early specialization, the speaker reviewed the more recent developments of physics and the new conception of physical processes with which he himself has been so intimately concerned. As he aptly said in his concluding sentences: "The new discoveries made in physics in the last few years, and the ideas and potentialities suggested by them, have had an effect upon the workers in that subject akin to that produced in literature by the Renaissance. Enthusiasm has been quickened, and there is a hopeful, youthful, perhaps exuberant, spirit abroad which leads men to make with confidence experiments which would have been thought fantastic twenty years ago."

Professor Rutherford naturally chose for discussion one of the subjects in the newer physics with which his own work—largely carried on in a Canadian university—has been concerned, namely, the present position of the atomic theory and the values of certain fundamental atomic magnitudes. Before the