SCIENTISTS CONCLUDE SYMPOSIA AT HARVARD

Moving their headquarters from M.I.T. to Harvard's laboratories, last Friday afternoon, over 200 members of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America held discussions and symposia here over the week-end, at the first meeting of the societies that has been held in Cambridge for over ten years.

During the meeting Theodore Lyman '97, Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, Emeritus, and Director of the Jefferson Physical Laboratory, was awarded the Frederick Ives medal for outstanding work in Physics. The Ives medal was created in honor of the late Frederick Ives by his son, Herbert S. Ives, of the Bell Telephone laboratories in New York City.

At another session of the meeting, G. F. Metcalf and T. M. Dickinson of the General Electric Company described a new vacuum tube, 1000 times more sensitive than existing tubes in the meas-

In ordinary tubes the gas pressure is of the order of a millionth of an atmosphere. The new tube has been exhausted to a billionth of atmospheric pressure, reducing noise between 100- and 1000-forl.

Other events of the meeting included a talk by P. W. Bridgman '04, Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, on the subject "Anomalies in the Behaviour of Solids under Pressure," and the examination by members of the Society of Harvard's new Physics laboratories, which have tripled the facilities for research in the department.