Remembering The Laser’s Founding Father Charles H. Townes
(PRWEB) September 24, 2015 -- In his 1999 book How the Laser Happened, the late Charles Hard Townes explained that, “Once invented, lasers found a myriad of uses” and noted that they had advanced to the point that “the smallest lasers are so tiny one cannot see them without a microscope.”
A far cry from the heady days of the 1950s. Imagine Townes conceptualizing and building a maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) at Columbia University before the heated race to pursue a patent for an optical maser — the laser. Imagine the fevered discussion in the scientific community as Townes and Arthur Schawlow at Bell Labs beat Gordon Gould and Technical Research Group to that first laser patent — two months before Theodore Maiman built his ruby laser for Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, CA, in 1960.
Townes — who famously conceived the idea for the laser while sitting on a park bench in Washington, DC in 1951 — worked until his 99th year, maintaining an office at the physics department of the University of California, Berkeley. The campus honored him with a birthday celebration July 28, 2014; he passed away in January 2015.
Dr. Paul Goldsmith, of the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA, and former Townes student, studied with Townes while pursuing his Ph.D. at Berkeley from 1971 to ’75. “I found him then and since to be an extraordinary individual in terms of being able to be engaged and helpful with students even in the midst of having many students, colleagues (and) huge responsibilities. You could always get a chance to talk to him, and he would be able to answer questions and be an inspiration in a way that was just remarkable.”
Encountering Townes throughout his career, Goldsmith “still always gained a great deal from hearing his thoughts on scientific questions and enjoyed interacting (with him) as a wonderful human being.”
Such was Townes’ impact that he received LIA’s first Lifetime Achievement Award at ICALEO 2010 in Anaheim. Reflecting on the award in an email, Townes noted that “I am very privileged to receive the lifetime achievement award. And I feel my life has been very privileged by the opportunity to do research, discover new things, and particularly by the discovery of how a laser could be made. I am also delighted by the many contributions that colleagues have made in development of the laser and further associated discoveries. These have made the field of optics blossom with so many fascinating contributions to science and to technology. Many thanks for this honor, and more importantly many thanks for the many contributions other scientists and engineers have made towards the exciting growth of optics.”
Dr. Arno Penzias, a partner with venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates in Menlo Park, CA, and winner of a 1978 Nobel in physics for his work in radio astronomy, earned his Ph.D. under Townes in 1961 at Columbia University before taking a full-time job at Bell Labs.
Townes “was really honest… and never cut corners,” Penzias remembers, “and he had scientific integrity. He had an amazing sense of humor; he was an extremely polite Southern gentleman.”
Penzias remembers his former teacher for far more than the laser. “He’s done so many things; I wouldn’t say the laser (was most important).” Townes’ repertoire ranged from low-energy experimental physics to spectroscopy, interstellar molecules, astrophysics and microwave technology. “Pretty much anything outside of nuclear physics he’d get his hands on.”
Ultimately, “he really was a teacher,” Penzias concludes. “He was very empathetic if someone had a problem — as I did; he worked me through it. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have gotten my Ph.D.”
For the full article, please visit the LIA blog, LASERS TODAY at http://www.laserstoday.com/CharlesTownes
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