Posted on 01/28/2015 2:20:17 PM PST by SeekAndFind
BERKELEY, Calif. - Charles Townes, professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the laser died Tuesday, according to Berkeley's website.
Townes, 99, had been in failing health and passed away en route to the hospital.
"The passing away of Professor Charles Townes today marks the end of an era," said astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, a colleague and professor of physics at UC Berkeley. "He was one of the most important experimental physicists of the last century."
In 1951, Townes was seated on a park bench in Washington, D.C. when he thought up the solution to the problem of how to create a beam of pure short-wavelength, high-frequency light. Later in 1954, he built a device that stimulated molecules to emit microwaves in a coherent burst and called it a maser, for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
In 1958, he and brother-in-law, and future Nobel Prize winner, Arthur Schawlow came up with the idea of doing the same with an optical light, but this time using mirrors at the ends of a gas tube for light amplification, which he called an "optical maser." Townes kept the patent on the maser, while Bell Labs patented the laser. Townes was appointed as director of research for the U.S. government's Institute of Defense Analysis in 1959. Meanwhile, scientist Theodore Maiman demonstrated the first laser - light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation - in 1960.
Townes shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention in 1964, sharing it with Russian scientists Aleksandr M. Prokhorov and Nicolai G. Basov, who independently developed their idea for a maser.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Charles Townes was quite sympathetic to the idea of Intelligent Design.
Townes (1915–2015) was interviewed in 2005 in a UC Bekeley article:
Q: Should intelligent design be taught alongside Darwinian evolution in schools as religious legislators have decided in Pennsylvania and Kansas?
Townes: “I think it’s very unfortunate that this kind of discussion has come up. People are misusing the term intelligent design to think that everything is frozen by that one act of creation and that there’s no evolution, no changes. It’s totally illogical in my view. Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it’s remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren’t just the way they are, we couldn’t be here at all. The sun couldn’t be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here.”
The laser was invented just in time to be used in “Goldfinger.”
Some postulate an infinite number of universes to live with that dilemma, which must send Occam spinning in his grave.
He was an interesting guy. I met him once at an American Philosophical Society meeting.
I had surgery on both eyes with what they called a “YAG” laser. Just as the Dr. said, it was a piece of cake.
I read up on it and before lasers, it was a difficult operation often accompanied by problems.
And the pilot episode of Johnny Quest, my favorite show at the time.
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I'm sure there was a reason they didn't call it the GAY laser....
Get the villain to monologue, then you’re golden.
a “YAG” laser is one whose frequency and other characteristics is governed by its use of Yttrium Aluminum Garnet; a synthetic gemstone grown in and crystallized out of high-temp furnaces.
My Dad used to have a synthetic gemstone business and peddled chunks of YAG for home-brew gemstone faceters to cut up.
Go to the light
RIP.
Thanks, that is interesting.
I simply had to stare at a dot for maybe 30 seconds and I kept seeing and hearing red dot flashes. No pain at all.
Glad he settled on "laser." "Hand me my maser gun" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
I hope he’s given a national state funeral.
There was an SNL skit where the villians were on The Tonight Show saying those exact things. Mike Myers played the bald SPECTRE character with the white cat (best one to me was Donald Pleasence).
Myers used this as his “Dr. Evil” character in the Austin Powers movies.
I went to the Univ of Ark in the late 70’s and their pyschics department were doing laser research. They were instrumental in the development of making laser useful for things like dental/eye work, etc.
I did two semesters on work study and the department and got to see a lot of their work. It was fun.
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