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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Charles Townes, physicist who invented the laser, dies at 99

Townes
Los Angeles Times

In 1951, physicist Charles Townes was lost in thought on a park bench in Washington, D.C., pondering a yearslong puzzle: how to create an intense beam of light – short in wavelength and high in frequency – with far-reaching practical uses. Albert Einstein had theorized that it could be done, but no one had yet managed the feat.

On that bench, surrounded by blooming azaleas, the solution came to Townes, then a 35-year-old Columbia University researcher. It involved a flash of bright light, a population of excited ammonia molecules and a mechanism for limiting the wavelengths they could then emit.

On the back of an old envelope, he “just scratched it out,” he said of his brainstorm.

A few years later, he and two colleagues had designed and built a device they called a maser, with the “m” signifying microwave energy.

When the microwaves were replaced by light waves, the laser was born.

Townes, whose invention brought him the shared 1964 Nobel Prize in physics and spawned advances in nearly every area of modern society – including home entertainment technology, medicine, cosmology and commerce – died Tuesday in Oakland, California, while on his way to a hospital, according to the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent the last five decades of his career. He was 99.

“He was one of the most important experimental physicists of the last century,” UC Berkeley astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel said in a statement. “His strength was his curiosity and his unshakeable optimism, based on his deep Christian spirituality.”

Townes once said he regarded his “revelation” on the park bench as a sign of the interplay between spiritual belief and scientific inquiry. In 2005, he received the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.

Few other modern inventions have had the wide-ranging effect of the laser. Lasers are at the core of the CD and DVD players in the home, the bar-code scanner in the supermarket, range-finders and altimeters used by the military, speed detectors used by state troopers and a host of other commercial products.

In medicine, their uses include laser scalpels, smoothing the skin, removing tattoos, reattaching retinas and shaping the cornea to eliminate the need for glasses. In astronomy, they are used for measuring distances and examining cosmological phenomena in deep space. In industry and government, they are used for high-speed transmission of data over fiber-optic cables.

More than a dozen Nobel Prizes have relied on work done with lasers.

Physicist Theodor W. Hansch of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, upon learning that he would receive a Nobel for using lasers to study the properties of atoms and molecules, said, “We all together stand on the shoulders of our giant, Charlie Townes.”

The technology has become so common that the term laser, an acronym for “light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation” coined by Townes and his students, has become generally understood throughout society – even though few understand the principles behind it.