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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, September 18, 2000
The initiation and development of the laser typifies many scientific and technical breakthroughs -- with unpredictability, doubts, successive ideas and enlargement of the field, important interactions between science and engineering, and the sociology of science and technology, including, for example, the mutual stimulation of colleagues. The laser story will be discussed in some detail, with emphasis on its illustration of how science and technology develop and how such developments may be best encouraged.
Charles H. Townes was born in Greenville, S.C. He received a B.A. and a B.S. from Furman University, an M.A. from Duke University and his Ph.D. degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology. In 1939 he joined Bell Labs on West Street in N.Y.C. During World War II he worked on radar bombing systems. In 1948 he joined the faculty of Columbia University and three years later had the idea that culminated in construction of the MASER. While serving as a consultant to Bell Labs, he began working on the principles of a device -- the laser -- that could operate at wavelengths a thousand times shorter than the maser. From 1959 to 1961 Charles Townes served as vice president and director of research of the Institute for Defense Analysis in Washington, D.C. He then was appointed provost and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently University Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at the University of California at Berkeley.
For his advances in the field of quantum electronics, Townes was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Dr. Eugene Waluschka
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov