Ministry of Defence Main Building (United Kingdom) each and cost £12,600. Similar figures representing "air" and "fire" were intended to be installed at the south end of the building, however these were never constructed. During the 1950s, building staff nicknamed the statues "Mr and Mrs Parkinson", after Cyril Northcote Parkinson, the Board of Trade civil servant who devised Parkinson's Law which states "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". More recently MOD staff refer to the statues as the "two fat ladies". The badge of the RAF is carved into stone columns either side of the southern entrance to the building, reflecting
Maupertuis's principle applied the principle only to light, not matter (see ). He arrived at the principle by considering Snell's law for the refraction of light, which Fermat had explained by Fermat's principle, that light follows the path of shortest "time", not distance. This troubled Maupertuis, since he felt that time and distance should be on an equal footing: "why should light prefer the path of shortest time over that of distance?" Accordingly, Maupertuis asserts with no further justification the principle of least action as equivalent but more fundamental than Fermat's principle, and uses it to derive Snell's law. Maupertuis specifically states