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proportionate to the mass of the structure and the time that the treatment goes on for and a certain integral of strain. He had some evidence for this assertion, for he produced papers by Koestlinger of Basle University and by Schiltgrad of Upsala indicating that something of the sort does happen. Schiltgrad had made attempts to trace what happens to this lost energy, and had produced the negative result that it did not appear in any of the normal forms, as heat, electrical potential, or momentum. Mr. Honey, sitting brooding over all this work, had convinced himself that this small energy flow produced a state of tension within the nucleus of aluminium of which the alloy is mainly composed, and that when this tension has built up to a certain degree one or more neutrons are released, resulting in an isotopic form of aluminium with crystalline affinities. This was the bare bones of his theory, and it was supported by about seventy pages of pure mathematics. It all seemed a bit like the Great Pyramid to me, and as difficult to criticise.
    At the end of an hour or so with him I said, “What value have you assigned to this quantity U m for that tailplane out there?”
    He said, “Well—provisionally—just for getting a rough idea of how long the trial is likely to go on for, you see, I made a rough estimate——” He fumbled with his papers, shuffled them, dropped one on the floor and scrabbled after it, picked it up, looked at it upside down, turned it right way up, and said, “Here it is. 2.863 × 10 −7 . That’s in C.G.S. units, of course.”
    I took the sheet from him and studied it. It was untidy work, half in pencil and half in ink, written in a vile hand, rather dirty. “Those are just the rough notes,” he said nervously. “I shall write it all up properly later on.”
    I nodded. One must not, must not ever, be influenced by
gaucheries
when dealing with these people. Untidiness may be a sign of slovenly thinking in an adult man, but it can also be a sign of an immensely quick intellect that gives no time for neat and patient writing. Mr. Honey was obviously nervous of me, and he was showing at his worst.
    “This figure, 2.863,” I said at last. “That’s a pretty exact figure, Mr. Honey—four-figure accuracy. When that constant goes into your theory, the time to reach fatigue failure will be directly proportional to that, won’t it?” I turned to one of the final sheets of mathematics that he had displayed before me.
    “That’s right,” he said. “The time to nuclear separation is directly proportional to U m .”
    “Well, I don’t call that a rough estimate,” I said. “That’s a pretty detailed estimate, surely? I mean, that figure says that in a given case something may be going to happen in two thousand eight hundred and sixty-three hours. I should have said a rough estimate was one that said something would happen between two and three thousand hours.” I glanced at him.
    He shifted uneasily. “Well, naturally, I went into it as carefully as I could.” He showed me what he had based his estimate upon. It was a pile about three feet high of the Proceedings of practically every engineering learned body in Europe and America. “I couldn’t find anything about light alloy structures in fatigue prior to the year 1927,” he said dolefully. “I don’t know if there’s anything else I ought to have got hold of.”
    I laughed. “I shouldn’t think so, Mr. Honey. If you’ve gone back to 1927 you’ve probably got everything there is.”
    “I hope I have,” he said.
    I turned over the sheafs of papers that were his analysis of previous trials and from which he had deduced the value of 2.863 × 10 −7 for U m , and I came to the conclusion that whatever bees he might have in his bonnet, he was at any rate a patient and an indefatigable worker, if rather an untidy one. At the end of ten minutes I said, “Well, if this is what you call a rough estimate, Mr. Honey, I’d like to see a