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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
..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.
It's amazing, you don't look a day ove....
Oww, my eye!
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
2012: 50 year birthday for the visible-spectrum LED, without which no advanced machines could be build!
And without those making the serious computers, with a wall of blinking lights, would be so much harder...
One that hath name thou can not otter