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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.”
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.
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...
...goes that they wanted to name the invention Light Oscillation by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, but nobody would like a LOSER
Speakers of 19th century English?
Death: "I've come for you."
Townes: "No thanks, I'll pass... Oh, wait!"
Death: "Muhehehehe!" [snatches him]
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
Sci-fi had pew-pew-pew long before there were lasers. Ask Buck Rogers. Or Kimball Kinnison--he'll be happy to show you his DeLamaters.
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.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobe... Interesting reading.
This is why I loathe the euphemisms for death. I realised this when the man I sailed for (for over a decade) died. It wasn't a massive surprise, but still a shock. To most of us it was the end of an era. What struck me was that most of the others talked about "him passing", whereas I simply said " he died", and I caught a couple of glances when I said it like that.
As another example - my sister was with friends (in a marina on a friend's boat - we like our sailing) and a guy walks down the companionway and said "X is gone". My sister stops talking (people come and go from marinas all the time), and then continues talking. The guy says " are you stupid or what - X has died ", making her feel like a shit.
People die, it happens, but dispense with the euphemisms - there's nothing to be gained from them.
On his deathbed he said his biggest regret was his inability to mount his invention on sharks.
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