Dimming of a Light...

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Topics: History, Laser, Modern Physics, Nobel Prize, Quantum Mechanics

Forgive me: His passing was announced on Friday, but I was on a blogging break then.

How soon we forget this was once all theoretical, now it's how we play our CDs and DVDs, programming our electronic devices...those were lofty days, when we looked forward to the future and the hope in science. Dr. Townes' light has dimmed, but not his lasting impact, a kind of immortality that is worth striving for. As a nation, we cow in fear of the light science brings to our previous ignorance; we're always longing for the past; looking ever backwards to a utopia that never was, simultaneously ignoring a future that we could create.

The US physicist Charles Townes, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work that led to the development of the laser, has died at the age of 99. Townes played an integral part in the race to make the first laser by developing its forerunner – the "maser" – which could produce and amplify electromagnetic radiation in the microwave region of the spectrum.

Townes' key work began while he was at Columbia University in the early 1950s, when he proposed a device that could produce coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. He coined the term "microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation" – or maser – although Townes was not the only person to have the idea. Independently, and at a similar time, Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Joseph Weber of the Catholic University of America, had also been working on the theoretical framework behind the maser.

Physics World: Laser pioneer Charles Townes dies aged 99