NOTES AND COMMENTS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 61, Issue 283, 11 September 1941, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

BIRTH OF A NEW IDEA. In an endeavour to explain how the creative mind does its work, Professor J. B. S. Haldane said: — “My view is that you go over a vast mass of material, you become familiar with it, and then quite suddenly something happens with a click; you see a new idea or a new form. E should say nobody knows in the very least hotv that is done, but it is done at a level below consciousness, and it comes to the surface on the most inappropriate occasions. Of the three best mathematical ideas I have had in my life, one happened in a night club where there were two jazz bands playing and I was doing sums, another when I was under crossexamination before a military court with a possibility of being shot; and a third while I was driving a motorcar through traffic. And I have not the vaguest idea how those ideas came up.” BATTLE OF PRODUCTION. “We have all read pretty often in the last few weeks and in the last few months of British troops and Allied troops being overwhelmed by superior weight of metal and machines,” said Mr Douglas Jay in a recent address. “We do not need to be convinced any more that the bravest men cannot resist a combined onslaught from machines in the air and machines on the ground; and we do not need to be convinced that if the Greeks, and the Yugoslavs, and the French, and the .British, could be armed equally with the Germans, the Allies would be on top. What is it that is going to determine which side has the most guns and tanks and aeroplanes when the really decisive campaigns' of this war come to be fought? It is, in the last resort, the Battle of Production which in this modern war is going? on all the time, by day and night, behind the Battles of France, and Britain, and Greece, and Iraq, which flare up periodically and then subside. Many of these latter battles have been won before they started, because one side or the other had' already won the Battle of Production. And that battle, remember, is being fought not only in the aircraft and shell factories, but in the quarries, docks and railway sidings, by those digging allotments and collecting salvage materials just as much as by those driving rivets' in the shipyards.” Blthrow itarycs :mil