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The Laser Turns 50
sonicimpulse writes with news that tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of physicist Theodore Maiman's creation of the first operational laser.
"Theodore Maiman made the first laser operate on 16 May 1960 at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California, by shining a high-power flash lamp on a ruby rod with silver-coated surfaces. He promptly submitted a short report of the work to the journal Physical Review Letters, but the editors turned it down. Some have thought this was because the Physical Review had announced that it was receiving too many papers on masers — the longer-wavelength predecessors of the laser — and had announced that any further papers would be turned down. But Simon Pasternack, who was an editor of Physical Review Letters at the time, has said that he turned down this historic paper because Maiman had just published, in June 1960, an article on the excitation of ruby with light, with an examination of the relaxation times between quantum states, and that the new work seemed to be simply more of the same. Pasternack's reaction perhaps reflects the limited understanding at the time of the nature of lasers and their significance."
You're a good friend and I wish you all the best for the future.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Still no succesful integration with friggin' sharks... :(
One that hath name thou can not otter
How old are the laser sharks again?
..but I suppose we do have hi-def films, DVDs, CDs, cutting tools, holograms, spectroscopy, acne cures, hair removal, LIDAR, surgical tools and the barcode scanner. Which almost makes up for it.
I wonder if the original creators knew how their invention would revolutionize shark-based diabolical traps.
It's amazing, you don't look a day ove....
Oww, my eye!
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
I remember the first article I saw about the laser. I'm not sure if it is was in Popular Science or Scientific American, but I remember that it was described as a solution without a problem. For years after it was invented no one had any idea of what to do with the damn thing.
Now, it seems like they are everywhere there is one in every CD, DVD, and Blue Ray drive. We use them to align everything along that nice straight line. We are testing laser laser weapons. We use them to remove hair and correct eyes. They are critical to many manufacturing processes including precision cutting. Not to mention the whole field of holography and holographic optical elements.
But, It took many years for people to even start imagining what the thing was good for. And, even longer for the technology to get to where they could be used for practical applications. The history of the laser is a perfect study in how a really new idea develops into a useful technology. After 50 years we are only seeing the beginning of the application of the Laser.
Got to love it.
Stonewolf
"a solution looking for a problem."
Found some.
Pix: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cassiel-com/sets/72157622557842760/
A lot of things that seem like interesting but irrelevant phenomena at the outset turn out to be tremendously important later; that's why pure science is so important, yet so hard to justify to short-sighted "results-oriented" people like your average congresscritter. Whether it's the integrated circuit or, for that matter, electricity itself, fundamental discoveries and inventions tend to precede their applications, often by decades. Later, when someone attempts to solve a particular practical problem, some previously unused discovery is picked up and used as part of the solution, and only then does its significance become apparent.
It's a safe bet that fifty years from now, someone with a ten-digit Slashdot user ID will post a story about how clueless we were in 2010 about the earth-shattering importance of something few of us have heard of today except as a scientific curiosity. (And, no doubt, some of us who are still alive then will post thoughtful replies about obsolete technologies that will be immediately tagged "getoffmylawn" by younger folks.)
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I gotta wear (ANSI Z 136 compliant) shades...
Nothing turns me on more than mature technology.
The discovery is 50 years old, and my parents laser printer is nearly 20 years old. The CD player is almost 30 years old. That's very fast from discovery to use to trickle down to consumer crap we can all buy. Sadly it took too long to turn the technology into a cat toy...
Sheldon
I know the above comment is modded flamebait because of the stupid note about nuking Japan, but he's completely right about the lateness of the laser's invention. The laser could have been invented in the 1930's, and very nearly was! Ali Javan himself, the inventor of the ubiquitous (or, at least, once ubiquitous in the 80's and 90's) helium neon gas laser said he would've almost certainly invented it in 1938 had he been around then. It is an accident of history that the laser took another 25 years to invent after most of the underlying science ("negative absorption", coherence, etc) were understood.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
These are already in the hands of the terrorists. The short window we have to wipe them out before they are able to wipe us out is rapidly closing. If you are not electing someone to protect us at any cost to political correctness, it must be because you have a death wish.
C'mon ThinkGeek give us a special sale on lasers to celebrate this historic event!
Cats everywhere wish the laser a happy birthday!
I once saw a detailed analysis, written a few years after WWII, that showed in great detail that every technology needed to build a V2 missile was in existence by 1910. But, the V2 didn't go into operation until the 1940s and development started more than 10 years earlier.
Now we have the laser as an example of another technology that could have been invented 30 to 40 years earlier. But, in fact, neither of them was invented earlier.
The point is that first you have to imagine that something is possible, and that goes beyond just having a theoretical proof of the possibility. Then you have to believe that it is possible. But, even that is not enough. You have to have someone who was exposed to the knowledge required to invent the thing who has the belief and who has access and understanding of the precursor technologies.
Then, that person, or persons, has to have the will and the resources needed to finally build a working model.
After that comes the hard part. The hard part is convincing people that what you have done is something new and valuable. In the case of the V2 the large holes that appeared in the European landscape were plenty of proof. In the case of the laser the poor guy couldn't even get his paper announcing his invention published because the people doing peer review didn't understand what he said.
The challenge is to go out and identify research that actually points to world changing new technology. If you can do that, then you are a genius and you will be doing a huge service for humanity.
Stonewolf
... given how many lasers are in my house. The DVD and CD players, game systems - hell, even my toolbox has a laser level to help me hang a row of pictures straight on a wall.
And yet my geared bicycle requires nothing shy of a virgin, a volcano and some extraordinary good luck to get the rear derailleur aligned so it shifts clean and taught. Bicycle gears, in their current form, have been around since the 1950s [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_gearing#History], and yet the shifting technology hasn't changed much. Until CDs and DVDs came along I'd bet there were thousands upon thousands of bicycles for each laser, and yet the bicycle gets nowhere near the attention the laser does.
And the bicycle won't put your eye out!
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
One? I had FIFTY.
The idea (LOL!) was to drill holes into my eyeballs to relieve the excessive Intraocular Pressure (IOP) of Glaucoma.
I initially had a IOP of 54 and 55 in each eye. (Ask your Doctor about this)
I asked the ophthalmologist about the laser: "Does this shit really work?" He answered "We're not really sure". Thanx, Doc.
Anyhow, the first few shots were like tiny pinpricks to the eyeballs.
After about ten or fifteen zaps, it REALLY started to be uncomfortable, to put it mildly.
Ten years later, I still take my myriad of eyedrops daily . Presumably the "Laser Witch Doctor" stuff was not successful.
And I suspect my retinas are still deteriorating....
.
- aqk
F U
I met Theodore Maiman once, when he gave a lecture at a college, and got to talk to him afterwards since I was working as an assistant to the prof who got him to come. One of the things I thought was interesting about his talk was, as the summary sort of discusses, the basic stuff of a laser was well-known. Indeed, people had nearly made lasers when they started manufacturing Geiger-Muller tubes. So Maiman spent a lot of time talking about the progression of technical concepts, from investigating the mechanics of fluorescence and phosphorescence and why they're different, to high-voltage supplies and flash tubes, to show that the laser is amazing but clearly nothing more than a clever tweak of existing technology. I asked him about this, why he'd spent so much time talking about applicable pre-laser research and only a small amount of time talking about neat stuff like Doppler cooling, and he said he did so because he was tired of people saying lasers were UFO technology and wanted to make it very clear that they were obvious and he was just lucky enough to be the one who managed to put one together.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightpeak
If Intel get this right, and the licensing costs aren't ridiculous we might finally get that 'be all and end all' cable for the PC we wanted for all those years.
I went on a lightpeak google frenzy yesterday, Intel wanted to get it out for the 50'th birthday of the lazer actually.
The laser could have been invented in the 1930's, and very nearly was!
There are many inventions that could have been made "earlier", but in most cases, either the theory or some other supporting technology wasn't there yet. Somebody actually built and patented a FET-like transistor in the 1920s, but it's not clear that it ever worked. Lacking both ultrapure crystals and underlying theory, the best they could have done back then was to build a flaky device that sometimes worked, like a "crystal radio" with a "cat's whisker" that had to be adjusted manually to find a good spot on a galena crystal.
Scanning tunneling microscopy could easily have been done in the early 1950s. That was closer to a failure of imagination, because an STM isn't that complicated; it's far simpler than an electron microscope.
Steam engines might have happened maybe 2000 years earlier. But steel and precision cannon-boring had to come first. Affordable steel production was a surprisingly late invention. It wasn't until 1876 (!) that the "basic Bessemer process" made steel a high-volume item. Most of the 19th century ran on cast and wrought iron. Even boilers, which was Not A Good Thing.
You poor poohs! It sounds horrible. Thanks for sharing your stories of doctor trauma. i cannot stand to have my eyeballs touched -- squick!
OK, so the comments are boring, smartass. /.
Go ahead- mod me down some more-
My karma resides elsewhere; I don't waste it on
.
- aqk
F U
That's the laser I actually use the most... Even though I run a microscopy lab that uses all kinds of lasers (Ar, He, He-Ne, dye, also two femtosecond titanium:sapphire lasers).
http://xkcd.com/729/
Also happy birthday laser!
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
I wonder if any one anticipated you'd be able get one as tiny a pen for just a few dollars 30-some years later. And anyone could buy it.