AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
But his former employers (at the research wing of AT&T known as Bell Labs) were also interested in his idea and asked him to consult. Well that was a revelation," he told NPR's Morning Edition during a 2005 interview.Īt the time, he was doing fundamental research at Columbia University. Finally, the basic concept for a laser came to him in the spring of 1951, as he sat on a park bench in Washington D.C. He spent a long time thinking about similar devices that didn't quite work. Townes wanted to use laser light as a precision tool for his research on molecules. It was that single-mindedness that led Townes to come up with the idea for a laser, a device that sends out a bright beam of carefully synchronized light particles. "At the same time, he was very dedicated and single-minded about what he did." He was just a very nice person," says Elsa Garmire, a physicist at Dartmouth who studied under Townes when he was teaching at MIT in the 1960s. But often his smarts weren't the first thing that people noticed. Townes was born in 1915 in Greenville, South Carolina. "He really was one of these rare people who could be a deeply thinking research scientist and yet, at the same time, be a deeply devout Christian," says Reinhard Genzel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. Through it all, he maintained a deep religious faith. government and helped uncover the secrets of our Milky Way galaxy. Townes is best remembered for thinking up the basic principles of the laser while sitting on a park bench. Julian Wasser/The LIFE Images Collection/GettyĬharles Townes, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his part in the invention of the laser died Tuesday at 99. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Charles Townes was single-minded about a lot of things, colleagues say.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |