Sir, - One of your most successful recent innovations must surely be the Science Today page each Monday, presenting breaking news in many areas of science and technology with erudition and a pleasing wit. It is clearly front and centre in the task of enhancing the public awareness of science, an aim shared by the RDS Committee for Science and Technology. A recent example of our "cur le cheile" was the joint Irish Times/ RDS presentation "Is Science Dangerous?" by Prof Lewis Wolpert.
I found your Science Editor Dick Ahlstrom's page of July 20th particularly interesting. It ranged from an enhanced role for edible periwinkles in Irish mariculture, to medical research from QUB on tumour growth inhibitors and from BioResearch Ireland on virus identification to a most stimulating article by Dr William Reville on the nature of light.
A brief comment, if I may, about a point in that article: "The electron, a sub-atomic particle, was discovered in 1897 by JJ Thomson." True, up to a point. Thomson indeed in 1897 was able to quantify the mass of these negatively charged particles, which he had up to then called "corpuscles", by deflecting cathode rays in an electric field. However, an Irish mathematical physicist, Prof George Johnstone Stoney, had in 1874 calculated an approximate value for the charge on this basic "god of very small things" which he termed an "electrine". It was at a lecture in the RDS in 1891, where he was vice-president, that he changed the designation to "electron".
Prof Stoney was one of a group of remarkable scientists in the RDS at that time who had a global reputation. One thinks of Prof John Joly, who inter alia pioneered colour photography, Sir Howard Grubb, Prof Henry Dixon, Dr George Pethybridge, et al. It occurs to me that their exploits should be more familiar to our new generation of scientists and technologists. Perhaps some of the talented contributors to the Science Today page might take on this centennial task? - Yours, etc., Chris Shouldice
Chairman, RDS Science and Technology Committee, Templeogue, Dublin 16.