SCIENTISTS AT PLAY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 21036, 21 November 1931, Page 3 (Supplement)

SCIENTISTS AT PLAY.

DAY'S VARIED OUTINGS.

DOZEN DIFFERENT JOY-RIDES

More than a thousand of the scientists who were recently attending the British Association meetings in Londontook a holiday one 3ne day. They assembled like a huge Sunday school treat at South Kensington, tumbled into motorcoaches and rolled of! on a dozen different joy rides. One party numbering nearly 500 visited the London Air Park at Hanworth. Grey-bearded professors gaped in astonishment as Flying-Officar Leech looped his machine " inside-out " in a display of crazy flying which defied .all lectureroom principles. Another party donned hobnailed boots and went hiking over the Chiltern Hills and over the chalk and sandstone downs of Surrey, forming wonderful geological theories as to how England happened. Yet another party went to the Whipsnade Zoo. But the elephants resolutely refused to show their back teeth to allow the 235 zoologists in the party a chance to test Professor Fairfield Osborn's theory that they show man to be nine million years older than lie was thought to be. Again, ther.e are no monkeys at Whipsnade, so the scientists got no farther with the missing link business. Sir Oliver Lodge made some amusing experiments when delivering his address on wii'eless communications. He took a rod . and rubbed, it briskly with a flannel. " I am transferring electrons from the flannel to the rod," he explained. Then, placing the rod against his snow-white hair, he made it stand on end stiffly. Then Sir ' Oliver made his audience jump by suddenly making fearsome-look-ing sparks come from an electric apparatus. After tribute to modern scientists, he said that the glow-worm knew how to do things that human beings did not.