Charles Townes, Nobel Prize winner - obituary
Physicist who developed a forerunner of the laser and won the Templeton Prize for religion
Charles Townes in 1964 Photo: The LIFE Images Collection/Getty
Charles Townes, who has died aged 99, earned the unusual distinction of
winning both the Nobel Prize for Physics, for his work on the theory and
application of the maser (the forerunner of the laser), and the Templeton
Prize for Progress in Religion.
Townes’s belief that science can be reconciled with a belief in God stemmed
from his own career as a physicist. When in 1951 he suggested that
microwaves could be used to make ultra-precise measurements in the
laboratory, he was told by Niels Bohr, the pioneer of quantum mechanics,
that he was wasting his time. His head of department at Columbia University,
the Nobel laureate Isidore Rabi, also told him to forget it. Yet he refused
to give up.
Townes had first became involved with microwave technology during the Second
World War when he worked at Bell Laboratories on the design of radar bombing
systems. After the war, he turned his attention to applying microwave
techniques to spectroscopy, which he saw as a potential tool for the study
of the structure of atoms and molecules and for controlling electromagnetic
waves.
In 1951 he conceived the idea of a new way to amplify microwaves, by
stimulating excited molecules to emit radiation. Three years later, he and
his assistants built the first “maser” (an acronym for “microwave
amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”). An intense flurry of
research followed. Masers have limited applications, although they are used
in atomic clocks and as electronic amplifiers in radio telescopes. It was
Townes’s brother-in-law, Arthur Schawlow (who would win the 1981 Nobel Prize
for Physics), who in 1957 set the ball rolling for the more revolutionary
“laser” when he began wondering if the maser principle could be extended to
light waves instead of microwaves.
The two men bounced ideas back and forth and decided that potassium vapour
might be a suitable medium. Together they wrote a paper outlining the
principles of “Infrared and Optical Masers” (now known as lasers – light
amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), which appeared in
Physical Review in December 1958.
Charles Townes (left) and J P Gordon presenting their atomic clock in 1955 (ROGER VIOLLET)
Townes often cited his discovery of the principles of the maser — an insight that had occurred to him as he sat on a park bench in Washington DC — as a “revelation” akin to a religious experience, and he was often teased by his scientific colleagues for his religious beliefs. In 1966 he published a seminal article, “The Convergence of Science and Religion”, which established him as a unique voice in seeking common ground between the two disciplines. “My own view is that, while science and religion may seem different, they have many similarities, and should interact and enlighten each other,” Townes wrote.
After learning that he had won the Templeton Prize in 2005, Townes explained that his views arose out of his perception that science, like religion, embodies paradoxes which can only be resolved by acts of faith. “There are many mysteries still in science, many mysteries and inconsistencies. Quantum mechanics is inconsistent with general relativity… So what do we do? Physicists just accept it. They believe in both. I think that’s what we have to do in life, recognise there are inconsistencies, places we don’t understand. We have to accept the mysteries and proceed.”
One of six children, Charles Hard Townes was born at Greenville, South Carolina, to Baptist parents on July 28 1915. His father was a lawyer. He was educated at local schools and at Furman University, a Baptist college in Greenville where he took degrees in Physics and Modern Languages and served as curator of the university’s natural history museum.
After taking a master’s degree in Physics at Duke University in 1936 he went on to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where he took a doctorate on isotope separation and nuclear spins.
In 1939 Townes became a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, where he specialised in microwave generation, vacuum tubes, and solid-state physics. The radar bombing systems which he developed during the Second World War proved particularly effective in the humid conditions of the Pacific theatre.
Charles Townes in 1961 (The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty)
In 1948 Townes moved to the Physics department of Columbia University, where he became a full professor in 1950. His research continued to be partly funded by the US Navy, which wanted radar systems with smaller wavelengths. This led him to focus on microwave research. He served as executive director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory from 1950 to 1952 and was chairman of the Physics department from 1952 to 1955.
In 1961 Townes was appointed Provost and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1966 he became Institute Professor and resigned the provostship in order to return to more intensive research in quantum electronics and astronomy. He went on to look for radiation from molecules in outer space and later became a champion of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence . He was appointed University Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in 1967.
Townes served on a number of scientific committees, notably as chairman of the advisory committee for the first human landing on the moon, and later as chairman of a US Defense Department committee which advised President Ronald Reagan against the deployment of the contentious MX missile system in 1982.
In addition to the Templeton Prize and the Nobel Prize, which he shared with two Russian scientists in 1964, Townes was appointed an Officer of the French Légion d’honneur in 1990, and was the recipient of the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal and nearly 100 other honours and awards. His scientific autobiography, How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist, was published in 1999.
Charles Townes married, in 1941, Frances Brown, with whom he had four daughters.
Charles Townes, born July 28 1915, died January 27 2015
Notes from viv: The awarding of the Nobel prize to Townes was very controversial, because they didn't build a laser, only discussed it and laid out some of the principles of the laser. They were very familiar with the spectroscopy of Ruby crystal (because that's what the maser was made from) and said that it would never work as a laser.
But Ted Maiman at Hughes Research did more careful measurements of the spectroscopy of Ruby and lo and behold made a laser out of it. The first operating laser. but he didn't get the Nobel prize.
It's said that he didn't get the prize because he worked for a company rather than for a university or a government.
I've seen Ted Maiman's notebook , it's in the archives at the Simon Fraser University library. He ended his career there as an adjunct professor.
