100 YEARS AGO

At the festivities held in Bologna on the occasion of Mr. Marconi's return to his native town, Prof. Augusto Righi, in congratulating his former pupil in his successes, spoke to the following effect:— Perhaps no one can appreciate better than I his exceptional inventive power and his unusual intellectual gifts. I remember with great pleasure his visits when quite a young man, for asking my advice, for explaining his experiments, made with simple apparatus ingeniously put together, and for keeping me informed of his new projects, in which his passion for applied science always stood out. Even then I predicted that he would sooner or later attain fame. The system of wireless telegraphy which he derived from Hertz's classical experiments ... is the most pleasing transference to the field of practical industry of those instruments and principles which might have seemed to be relegated to the domain of natural philosophy. ... It is to the credit of Marconi that he has once more proved how much those are in error who regard with disdainful or indifferent eyes the work carried on continuously in the silence of the laboratory by the modest and disinterested scientific students, and who only appreciate science in proportion to the immediate uses that can be obtained from it.

From Nature 9 October 1902.

50 YEARS AGO

Philosophic Problems of Nuclear Science. One summer evening in 1925, a small and very select meeting of theoretical physicists took place in one of the Fellows' rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge. It was a special occasion. ... A brilliant young mathematical physicist, fresh from Munich, Göttingen and Copenhagen, was about to expound his work in the field of atomic physics to a handful of people capable of appreciating it. The speaker was ... Werner Heisenberg, before long to become a celebrity for his 'uncertainty principle'. Subsequent events have added not only to his distinction but also to the debt which philosophers and scholars everywhere owe him for the profundity of his thought, and for the elegance of his expression. The present book does something to bring these things home to English-speaking readers. 'Something' is probably fair comment, for here is a collection of lectures, originally in German, translated with obvious sincerity but not always with complete idiomatic success.

From Nature 11 October 1952.