Letters

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 possibility 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.