50 Years Ago

During the past year, reports of a remarkable case of 'digital vision' have percolated into Britain from the U.S.S.R. ... The subject ... whose personality is admittedly abnormal, is said to have trained herself to distinguish colours and forms by means of her fingers and to be able to read books and newspapers by digital scanning alone ... It has been shown, for example, that her reading is not impaired by interposing a plate of glass between the print and her fingers or by projecting the print on to a ground glass screen to exclude tactile sensation. It might, therefore, seem that the girl's fingers are genuinely sensitive to light ... The lack of any image-forming device and the relative poverty of the nerve supply to the fingers in comparison with that of the eye constitute seemingly fatal objections to the hypothesis of 'digital vision'.

From Nature 2 November 1963

100 Years Ago

Vorlesungen über die Theorie der Wärmestrahlung. By Dr. Max Planck — The first edition of this book, which appeared in 1906, was reviewed in Nature ... The many and varied contributions to our knowledge of radiation phenomena that have been published in the ensuing years have made it necessary for Dr. Planck to rewrite and modify the book to a considerable extent ... As before, the object of the book is to apply the statistical methods previously used in the kinetic theory of gases to the phenomena of radiation ... The treatment is largely based on the remarkable assumption which the author designates as the “quantum-hypothesis.” ... This is analogous to the electron theory, which assigns a definite magnitude to the electron or “elementary quantum” of electricity.

From Nature 30 November 1913