100 YEARS AGO

The columns of daily papers have during the last two weeks contained many references to the question of the origin of life... Prof. Ray Lankester and Dr. Chalmers Mitchell... proclaim themselves, as followers of Huxley, believers in evolution generally, and in the natural origin of living matter in the past. They, like many others, refuse to believe that it takes place at the present time, because undoubted proof of its occurrence cannot be produced by laboratory experiments. The uniformity of natural phenomena would certainly lead us to believe, as Sir Oliver Lodge has intimated, that if such a process occurred in the past, it should have been continually occurring ever since — so long as there is no evidence to show cause for a break in the great law of Continuity. Certainly no such evidence has ever been produced, and if the origin of living matter takes place by the generation in suitable fluids of the minutest particles gradually appearing from the region of the invisible, such a process may be occurring everywhere in nature's laboratories, though altogether beyond the ken of man.

From Nature 10 November 1904.

50 YEARS AGO

Prof. Max Born, who has been awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1954, is known for many contributions to modern theoretical physics, particularly to the development of quantum mechanics and to the theory of crystals. The work mentioned specifically in the announcement of the Nobel award is the interpretation of the wave functions as probabilities for the positions of particles, a vital step in the development of the modern view of the relations between particle and wave aspects of atomic theory.

Prof. W. Bothe, of the University of Heidelberg, who shares the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics with Prof. Born, is known for many important contributions to modern physics. The best known of these include his introduction of coincidence methods into counting techniques and the work in which, together with Geiger, he applied the coincidence method to the Compton effect and showed that the conservation laws are satisfied in each individual event and not merely on the average. This was fundamental for the interpretation of atomic processes.

From Nature 13 November 1954.