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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.”
...goes that they wanted to name the invention Light Oscillation by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, but nobody would like a LOSER
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.
On his deathbed he said his biggest regret was his inability to mount his invention on sharks.
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