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Nobel Laureate and Laser Inventor Charles Townes Passes

Posted by samzenpus on from the rest-in-peace dept.

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.”

6 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Passes what? by thewils · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Wind? Seriously, what's wrong with the word "dies"?

    --
    Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
  2. A genuinely nice man by Epeeist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:A genuinely nice man by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Over 50 years ago, they indeed had no practical use. For a some years a common quip about the laser was that it was "a solution in search of a problem." It wasn't until the 1970s that any widespread applications were invented (barcode scanners were the first one).

  3. Re:Townes was Told that the Maser Was Impossible by mbkennel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Indeed. Bohr argued, even earlier, with Einstein on this issue, saying that stimulated emission was impossible. Einstein derived the rate equations for the laser.

    People erroneously imagine that Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics. He wasn't. And in two central areas, the Copenhagen interpretation (it is a useful approximation but makes no sense as physics, decoherence does), and the laser, Bohr was wrong and Einstein was right.

  4. Charles Townes' Nobel lecture by renergy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.nobelprize.org/nobe... Interesting reading.

  5. Re:Townes was Told that the Maser Was Impossible by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    He also discovered electron tunneling, though he gave it as evidence of how nonsensical quantum mechanics was. He was correct on the derivation, but wrong on the interpretation.

    Well, it IS nonsensical - I mean, by what means should an electron be able to go from point A to point B without acquiring the necessary energy to get over the energy barrier? Granted, the uncertainty principle means there's a chance it could "borrow" the energy temporarily, but that's a random event. What happened is we have a controllable way to tunnel electrons.

    These days we use electron tunnelling every day - the NAND flash chip relies on the floating gate to hold electrons and influence the transistor's parameters which is how it stores bits. And to get those electrons to the gate, we merely bias the transistor in such a way that electrons magically disappear and reappear on the floating gate, without shooting the electrons through the insulation.

    We don't get why or how they do it, but we can exploit it.