recently professor Danny Lee one of the
most distinguished chemists that has
worked in recent years in Nottingham was
a hundred years old he worked in areas
like catalysis DNA organic
semiconductors the things that you have
in the display of your Samsung phones
and all sorts of other areas and we held
a conference or half-day meeting of
lectures to celebrate his birthday and
the high point of this meeting was to be
the lighting of a hundred candles on the
cake and we had special apparatus we had
threads with methyl ethyl ketone on it
to make the flame spread between the
candles but then once we lit them some
of the candles had fallen over because
of the heat and I don't think that
perhaps they were pushed hard enough
into the candle holders then Sam and
Neil tried to put it out with buckets
that they had filled with carbon dioxide
gas but unfortunately it had been
sitting in the bucket so long that it
had largely diffused out
[Applause]
as you can see the aftermath what this
really shows is that if you want to have
a dramatic display sometimes it's better
if things don't go quite right
professor Healy was very pleased he cut
the cake and he made the little sweet
and we had nearly 400 people there so it
was a great event