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.”

Comments

Townes was Told that the Maser Was Impossible

[paradigmsareconstruc]

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.

Re:The father of Star Wars

[braindrainbahrain]

Surely you jest, but to go along with you, we must remember that H.G. Wells wrote about the Martian invaders using a "heat ray" in 1898.

Townes and Schawlow textbook

[borknado]

One of the best science texts ever. So far ahead of its time... http://books.google.com/books/...