100 YEARS AGO

Mr. W. W. Davis has a paper in “Studies from the Yale Psychological Laboratory”... on some relationships between temperament and effects of exercise. His tests and observations are scarcely sufficient to establish very definite relations, but the conclusions at which he arrives are not without interest. The observations suggest that nervous persons, in training for the development of strength, require light practice, and phlegmatic persons require vigorous practice. The phlegmatic type of temperament is apparently characterised by the presence of much reserve energy of muscle and nerve cell. The nervous type has less reserve energy but a greater ability to use the energy at hand. It is not difficult to apply these principles to practical physical training. They make necessary on the part of the trainer a knowledge, secured either by means of observation or experiment, of the temperament of each man under his charge.

From Nature 29 August 1901.

50 YEARS AGO

The ground-state of the hydrogen atom is a hyperfine doublet the splitting of which, determined by the method of atomic beams, is 1,420.405 Mc./sec. Transitions occur between the upper (F = 1) and lower (F = 0) components by magnetic dipole radiation or absorption. The possibility of detecting this transition in the spectrum of galactic radiation, first suggested by H. C. van de Hulst, has remained one of the challenging problems of radio-astronomy. In interstellar regions not too near hot stars, hydrogen atoms are relatively abundant, there being, according to the usual estimate, about one atom per cm. Most of these atoms should be in the ground-state. The detectability of the hyperfine transition hinges on the question whether the temperature which characterizes the distribution of population over the hyperfine doublet — which for want of a better name we shall call the hydrogen 'spin temperature' — is lower than, equal to, or greater than the temperature which characterizes the background radiation field in this part of the galactic radio spectrum. If the spin temperature is lower than the temperature of the radiation field, the hyperfine line ought to appear in absorption; if it is higher, one would expect a 'bright' line; while if the temperatures are the same no line could be detected... We can now report success in observing this line.

From Nature 1 September 1951.