Professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley Charles Townes, the physicist who invented the laser and received the 1964 Nobel Prize, has died at the age of 99.
Townes passed away Tuesday in Oakland while on his way to the hospital, UC Berkeley reported.
"Charles Townes embodies the best of Berkeley; he's a great teacher, great researcher and great public servant," said UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks at a campuswide celebration of Townes' 99th birthday last July 28. "As we celebrate this 99-year milestone and a career spanning nearly 80 years, we can only be impressed by the range of his intellectual curiosity, his persistence and his pioneering spirit."
Until his health started to fail last year, Townes was known to visit the UC Berkeley campus every day to work.
Townes was born July 28, 1915, in Greenville, S.C. He attended Furman University and graduated summa cum laude in 1935 with a BS in physics and a BA in modern languages at only the age of 19. He completed an MA in physics at Duke University in 1936 and received his Ph.D from Caltech in 1939.
In 1951 Townes had an almost "religious" revelation that he wanted to create a way to produce pure beams of short-wavelength, high-frequency light. This revolutionary idea was eventually transformed into the laser, which is now extremely useful in fields such as "medicine, telecommunication, entertainment and science."
The physicist, who was then a professor of Columbia University and a consultant for Bell Telephone Laboratories, worked out how to separate excited from non-excited molecules and store them in a resonant cavity. This allowed microwaves travelling through the gas to fall in step with each other in a "coherent burst." Along with his students, the researchers built this type of device in 1954 and called it a "maser" (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation).
Four years later Townes and his brother-in-law future Nobelist Arthur Schawlow thought up the idea of accomplishing the same feat using optical light with mirrors at either end of a gas tube to create an "optical maser," or laser.
Townes shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with two Russians, Aleksandr M. Prokhorov and Nicolai G. Basov, who also came up with the idea for the maser independently.
Townes went on to use maser in radio astronomy and lasers in infrared astronomy, allowing scientists to detect the first complex molecules in interstellar space and measure the mass of the black hole located in our galaxy.
"Charlie Townes had an enormous impact on physics and society in general," said Steven Boggs, professor and chair of the UC Berkeley Department of Physics. "Our department and all of UC Berkeley benefited from his wisdom and vision for nearly half a century. His overwhelming dedication to science and personal commitment to remaining active in research was inspirational to all of us. Berkeley physics has lost a true icon and our deepest sympathies go out to his wife, Frances, and the entire Townes family."
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