CHARLES TOWNES
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The Nobel Tradition at Berkeley

Charles H. Townes
Physics, 1964

By Russell Schoch
1984

 

Charles Hard Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on July 28, 1915. He attended the Greenville public schools and then Furman University where he completed the B.S. degree in physics and the B.A. in modern languages, graduating summa cum laude in 1935, at the age of 19. Because of its "beautiful logical structure," physics had fascinated him since his first course in the subject during his sophomore year in college.

Townes completed work for the M.A. in physics at Duke University in 1936 and earned the Ph.D. in 1939 from the California Institute of Technology. A member of the technical staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1939 to 1947, Townes worked extensively during World War II designing radar systems. From this he turned to applying the microwave technique of wartime research to spectroscopy.

At Columbia University, where he was appointed to the faculty in 1948, Townes continued his research in microwave physics. In 1951, he conceived the idea of the maser; in 1958, Townes and his brother-in-law, Dr. A. L. Schawlow, conceived the idea of the laser. Lasers and masers are devices that produce a unique kind of radiation. Lasers produce an intense beam of a very pure single color; masers produce similar radiation, but in the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The names are acronyms derived from Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (MASER) and Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER). Although the maser was conceived first, the laser has proven more useful.

Laser, in fact, have been called a fulfillment of one of mankind's oldest technological dreams, that of providing a light beam intense enough to vaporize the hardest and most heat-resistant materials. Townes has called the laser "a marriage of optics and electronics," explaining that the laser gives an intensity of light which is as much as a billion times the intensity of light on the surface of the sun. To achieve that intensity, the laser beam must be localized in a very small area; within that area, it will go through any material very quickly. Lasers have been used, among other things, to drill holes in diamonds, to weld the retina of the eye to its supports to prevent detachment, and to perform microsurgery on parts of single cells.

From 1959 to 1961, Townes was on a leave of absence from Columbia to serve as vice president and director of research for the Institute of Defense Analysis in Washington, D.C. In 1961, he was appointed provost and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1964, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Townes and a pair of Russian physicist who had independently conceived the idea of the maser shortly after Townes began his initial work in the 1950s.

In 1967, Townes was appointed Professor-at-Large at the University of California, participating in research, and other activities on several campuses of the University, with his headquarters in Berkeley. He is currently University Professor at the Berkeley campus.

__________

Schoch, Russell. "Charles H. Townes: Physics, 1964. "The Nobel Tradition in Berkeley:
     University of California, Berkeley. UC Berkeley Development Office: UC Press,
     1984, p. 24.


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