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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 10, No. 2. March 19, 1947
[Introduction]
The French National Assembly, December 19, 1946, the day Paul Langevin died. When the announcement was made six hundred deputies and all the spectators in the visitors' gallery rose in a body and stood in reverent silence as they listened to the eulogy of the deceased. The Government honored him with a National funeral, and on a dark December day in bitter, biting weather, tens of thousands followed his bier to the cemetery. In the procession workers rubbed shoulders with scholars, shop girls marched by the side of professors, trade-unionists with their banners followed academicians.
The work of Paul Langevin scientist, was not of a kind that arouses and moves the masses. His achievements were in the least accessible fields of higher mathematics and physics. Magnetism, paramagnotism diamagnetism, and the introduction of restricted relativity and Einsteinian relativity to France—these were his work. Its fruit is to be found in the detection of underwater obstacles by a supersonic projector with a plezo-electric quartz base, and similar industrial developments. How then can we explain the scene in the National Assembly the reverent procession in weather that chilled to the bone?