The New Ideas in Meteorology¹

Abstract

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 dominating as the evolution which the previous century revealed in the animal kingdom. In physics the progress made has been most remarkable. At the beginning of the century, it is true, we had been introduced to the electron, to Röntgen rays, and to radioactivity; 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.