UP IN THE CLOUDS.
Sir,-After reading your’ leading article "After Many Years," in the issue of August 13, I feel that there are two matters concerning Dr. Comrie which might be corrected. First, so far as I know, he is not at present Superintendent of H.M. Nautical Almanac Office. He did hold this office from 1930 to 1937, but has since established a private business known as Scientific Computing Service Ltd. This has become a business venture of national importance in England, as those. acquainted with its inside story know. The second matter concerns the sentence, "If philosophy fails us. when we have reduced all knowledge to sym‘bols, have we not floated too long and too high in cold thin air?" I do not understand ‘what were the full implications which might have. been intended in the question. If, however, it is suggested that Dr. Comrie is up in the clouds too much, then I wish to point-out that nothing could be further from the truth. If ever there was an intensely practical man, penetrating the clouds if necessary in order to produce further practical benefits, then that man is Dr. Comrie. : The man who "went over the top" in 1918; who transformed the Nautical Almanac into’ a very practical volume; who did not invent calculating machines to carry’ out his computations, but explored existing commercial machines, and succeeded, thus saving much money in many spheres of national and international life; who in World War II. sweated in the production of millions of figures used by the forces-this man cannot be said to be up in the clouds. The bombers flying over France on D-day, and releasing the bombs according to tables produced by this man, may have been in the clouds at times, but the man himself had a firm grip on the solid ground. This was only one among hundreds of jobs performed by him during the war, and it was work requiring a little more than a philosophy which mav exist in cold thin air.
I. L.
THOMSEN
(Carter Observatory).
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 480, 3 September 1948, Page 5
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343UP IN THE CLOUDS. New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 480, 3 September 1948, Page 5
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