A light and laser show dazzles fans before game one of the 2014 Stanley Cup Finals. Charles H. Townes, the inventor of the laser, died Tuesday at age 99. Photo by Kirby Lee, USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
Charles H. Townes, a renowned physicist who invented the laser and the maser, died in Oakland, California on Tuesday at the age of 99. Townes’ inventions earned him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1964.
Charles Hard Townes, at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering symposium in June 2007. Photo via Wikimedia
Here’s how a laser works: Light is produced by exciting electrons inside atoms and releasing photons, particles of light. White light from the sun or a light bulb is full of different colors of light, or different wavelengths, all of which are moving out of sync.
A laser tube takes a single wavelength of light and corrals those excited electrons and photons. The laser forces them to move in sync. Then it can direct those photons in a single beam.
Los Angeles Times reporters Charles Piller and Thomas H. Maugh II compare it to a group of soldiers marching across a bridge:
“[W]hile the footsteps of the crowd have little effect on the bridge, the combined footfalls of the soldiers have much greater impact, causing the bridge to shake and tremble. Similarly, the coherent light from a laser carries much more power than simple white light, allowing it to burn through flesh or even steel,” they write.
The idea for the maser and the laser goes back to Einstein in 1917, but scientists thought it was impossible. Townes thought of the idea while sitting on a park bench in Washington, D.C. in 1951. He imagined a flash of light exciting ammonia molecules in a tube. After sketching the idea out, he returned to Columbia University. For the next three years, he worked with his brother-in-law physicist Arthur Schawlow to develop the first maser in 1954.
The maser eventually led to the laser in the 1960s, which was based on Townes and Schawlow’s design. But Townes’ claim to the laser was challenged by Gordon Gould, a Columbia graduate student. Gould claimed that over a weekend in 1957 he sketched a design for the laser. After years of lawsuits, Gould won $30 million in royalties and a separate patent on the laser in 1979.
A deeply religious man, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities in 2005 for bringing science and theology together. He described his inspiration on the park bench as a divine revelation. Townes advocated for communion between science and religion. In his article “The Convergence of Science and Religion” in 1966 he wrote that the differences between science and religion “are largely superficial, and…the two become almost indistinguishable if we look at the real nature of each.”
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