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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.”

5 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Townes was Told that the Maser Was Impossible by paradigmsareconstruc · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. 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.

  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. clarification on passing. by nimbius · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

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