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Nobel Laureate and Laser Inventor Charles Townes Passes
An anonymous reader writes Charles Hard Townes, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser and subsequently pioneered the use of lasers in astronomy, died early Tuesday in Oakland. He was 99. "Charlie was a cornerstone of the Space Sciences Laboratory for almost 50 years,” said Stuart Bale, director of the lab and a UC Berkeley professor of physics. “He trained a great number of excellent students in experimental astrophysics and pioneered a program to develop interferometry at short wavelengths. He was a truly inspiring man and a nice guy. We’ll miss him.”
Passes what? Please write in English.
I encourage everybody to closely watch the reporting on his life story. What you will notice is consistently left out, in nearly every instance, is the actual historical lesson that Charles was told by numerous leading quantum theorists of the day that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle precluded such a device. And they told him this even as he explained that he had already built a functional prototype. Check his autobiography. The history you hear for science is traditionally cleansed of the uncomfortable bits.
Without his pioneering work, Star Wars and indeed many other sci-fi movies that use 'pew-pew-pew' laser guns would simply have looked ridiculous using traditional ballistic weapons.
Wind? Seriously, what's wrong with the word "dies"?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I met him long ago, when I was doing my doctorate. His was one of the standard books on microwave spectroscopy. Apparently he was told that his work on creating the maser was a nice piece of physics, but one that would have no practical use...
Actually it was Gordon Gould that invented the laser,he just wasn't the first to build one.
...goes that they wanted to name the invention Light Oscillation by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, but nobody would like a LOSER
That made possible movie lines like these:
Bond: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!
Or even better, in the spoof Italian B movie (freely translated):
Goldfinger: And now we'll see how 007 turns into two 003-and-a-half.
The Angels will miss him, he had a great detective agency, even if he was a bit mysterious.
What?
Oh. Never mind.
But his legacy will shine in(to) our eyes FOREVER.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
For those of you not familiar with his work, Charles Townes likely passed through the gain medium repeatedly before emitted from the output aperture or lost to diffraction or absorption.
Good people go to bed earlier.
'nuff said
One of the best science texts ever. So far ahead of its time... http://books.google.com/books/...
Very sorry to hear that anyone dies, but death is part of life after all and there should be no shame in saying the word "dies". It bothers me that nobody likes to use the word "dies" or "dead" anymore, in U.S. pop culture at least. To me at least it seems like ever since that cheesy Crossing over with John Edwards show, everybody started using the word "passed" instead of "died". I know it's a terrible time for people close to those who die, but "passed" just sounds like an insult to the dead. At least say "passed away", which has dignity. "Passed" sounds like he passed gas, or drove by a diner on the highway, or something not at all sad or profound or dignified. Rant over.
Ah, the sixties, men walking on the moon, lasers, transistors, nuclear power...
and now we have flat TVs in our pockets and Facebook.
A deep fall from grace.
He may have passed his peers in the past when he proved them wrong, but yesterday he didn't pass anyone (except maybe in the ambulance or hearse) - he *died*.
I thought Gordon Could invented the laser.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobe... Interesting reading.
When I pass, it is because I fart
Yeah. But the rest of us are dying.
Have gnu, will travel.
We should not forget Gordon Gould's statements about being Townes' grad student who made the major critical breakthroughs for the laser. Gould had a three decade patent war to win his patent claims to invention of the laser and many developments. It's an interesting story for an overage commie grad student...
In the end, Japanese manufacturers paid over a billion $ royalties on Gould's patents.
In 1965 when he was still at M.I.T. he came to our annual fraternity alumni banquet. We had beer from a keg but it came out with too much foam. He noticed and told us to put a little dab of butter up in the spout to reduce the surface tension and reduce the bubbles. Worked like a charm. Great scientist and teacher but also very down to earth.
On his deathbed he said his biggest regret was his inability to mount his invention on sharks.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Given that Slashdot mentions in passing that the Greek president is an athiest (when the main point of the article isn't about him). I'd like to point out that Charles Hard Townes was (and is?) a Christian and a scientist!
In today's enlightened age, we must put all stories in context of the growing gender divide, and the struggle of minorities to coexist with the massive white hegemony that exist in the America. (by America I mean only the USA; after all, Mexico, Suriname, and Chile are not and have never been part of America). The fact that you would even mention a story about Townes, an old white man, and not discuss how the stimulated emission of radiation has made it more difficult for the native Americans, and the African Americans to move up the glass ceiling of corporate America, makes me, and hopefully you, realize how much repressed racism exists /. .
I demand an immediate apology, and a donation of 1 Million dollars to the Latino (and by latino I mean people who in fact speak Spanish, not Latin) scholarship fund. To help you ease out of your racism, I will volunteer to give the money to the fund, and act as a sort of middle man. Give me 1 Million dollars or I will let the media know that you guys hate black people. Also, you are probably a pedophile / terrorist / enemy to decency. The FBI and Secretive service are watching for creeps like you, and are standing by to confiscate your website. Give me my money or else
...and he was raped by the U.S. goverment who classfied his work. Townes invented the maser for sure, but Gould was first in light!