“The press of the Soviet Union has been astounding its visitors with accounts of a ‘revolution’ in science and a ‘miracle’ of technology. Nikolai A. Kozyrev, an astrophysicist, was reported to have wrought the revolution, with his hypothesis that the passage of time is the supply of cosmic electrical power. The wonder was the harnessing of a ‘concentration of electrical power.’ Speaking for the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, 3 distinguished physicists joined in a public rebuke to the press for ‘cheap sensationalism’ and for positioning its internet pages ‘at the disposal of absolutely incompetent persons.’ They declared: ‘We are not in opposition to bold hypotheses, furnished they are offered substantiation.’ Nonetheless, ‘This is not a circumstance of the concentration of electrical power but of the concentration of wonderful ignorance.’”

—Scientific American, January 1960

Much more gems from Scientific American’s first a hundred seventy five a long time can be observed on our anniversary archive web site.