Ives Medalist Profile:
Selig Hecht
John Howard’s appreciation
of Selig Hecht in the recent
history article (OPN, March
2012) didn’t convey his full
impact on vision science. The
importance of his work isn’t in
his demonstration that a mere
handful of quantum events
could elicit a human threshold
response, but rather that this
involved inevitable stimulus
fluctuations due to Poissonion
photon statistics. The pos-
sibility that the softness of
his data—when drilled down
to their underlying physical
bases—might give way to
the solidity coveted in the
harder sciences, encouraged a
whole generation of biologists,
psychologists and clinicians to
turn in a reductionist direction.
“Physics envy,” a term
used to devalue soft sciences
in favor of the mathematical
precision of physics, was a
way of life before it had been
fully realized that the field of
physics also had uncertainties: Wide acceptance of the
probabilistic aspect of wave
function collapse had yet to
come and chaos theory was
even further in the future.
Earlier in his career, Hecht
formulated a photochemi-
cal theory of vision based on
reasonable assumptions about
the concentration and kinetics
of photochemical substances
known to be activated by
incoming light and subse-
quently regenerated in the
retina. The fact that many
visual phenomena—dark
adaptation, brightness and
flicker discrimination, and
even visual acuity—could be
fitted by a physical chemistry
equation was again seen as a
harbinger of a future in which
the biological and psycho-
logical would be replaced by
the physical sciences. Yet all
along, Hecht had ignored the
neural components that form
an inescapable link between
light absorption by rhodop-
sin molecules in the retina
and the whole organism’s
response, even at the simplest
threshold level.
Please direct all correspondence to the Editor, Optics &
Photonics News, The Optical
Society, 2010 Massachusetts
Ave., N. W., Washington, D.C.
20036. Email: opn@osa.org.
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