Charles Townes

His father practiced law in Greenville, South Carolina, and his older brother grew up to become the world authority on ichneumon wasps, which tells you something about the household. Townes took two degrees at Furman at once, a bachelor of science in physics and a bachelor of arts in modern languages, and finished in 1935. A master's at Duke followed in 1937 and a Caltech doctorate in 1939, on isotope separation and nuclear spins. Then the war put him inside Bell Telephone Laboratories designing radar bombing systems, which meant years of driving microwaves to shorter and shorter wavelengths and learning precisely how molecules absorb them. Almost nothing he did afterward came from anywhere else.

At Columbia in 1951 he worked out a way to make an intense, precise beam of coherent radiation by getting excited molecules to give up their energy in step. In 1953 he, James Gordon and Herbert Zeiger built the first one, using ammonia. He named it the maser and took the fundamental patent. Five years later he and Arthur Schawlow published the paper that carried the idea into visible light, and the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics went to him, Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov. He ran research at the Institute for Defense Analyses, served as provost of MIT, chaired NASA's Apollo science committee, and moved to Berkeley in 1967, where he turned the instruments on the sky and measured gas at the galactic center moving fast enough to require three million suns of mass in a very small space.

The credit was fought over for 30 years. In 1956 Townes advised a Columbia graduate student named Gordon Gould about how to patent an idea and agreed to serve as his witness. In November 1957 Gould filled a notebook with the optical resonator scheme, coined the acronym LASER, and had the pages notarized at a neighborhood store. Townes and Arthur Schawlow arrived at the same cavity arrangement roughly three months later, filed in July 1958, and were granted the patent in March 1960. Gould and his employer challenged it in April 1959 and kept challenging, through litigation that ran into the late 1980s and finally produced 48 patents in Gould's name, with most of the proceeds signed away to pay the lawyers. Which man invented the laser depends on which document you count first.

He kept turning up in the Berkeley physics department past his 99th birthday and stopped only months before the end, dying on the way to a hospital in Oakland on January 27, 2015. Reinhard Genzel credited him with reshaping experimental physics across the last century and traced it to curiosity and an unshakable optimism grounded in his Christianity. That was the other half of him. He prayed daily, argued in print that science and religion must converge, described his own central idea as arriving in a flash nearer revelation than inference, and accepted the Templeton Prize in 2005. In 2012 the maser won him a Golden Goose Award, given to research that looked pointless and was not.

Charles Townes's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The ammonia maser invention
  Built with James Gordon and Herbert Zeiger at Columbia 1953
• Fundamental maser patent patent
  The patent that carried the idea, and the one Gordon Gould fought 1954
• Infrared and Optical Masers article
  With Arthur Schawlow — the paper that took the principle into light 1958
• The Convergence of Science and Religion article
  His argument that the two disciplines run in parallel 1966
• Infrared Spatial Interferometer invention
  Three mobile detectors aligned by laser, which caught Betelgeuse shrinking 1988
• Making Waves book
  Essays on the maser, the laser, and what he thought they meant 1995

• 1935 aged ~20 Graduates from Furman with degrees in physics and modern languages
• 1939 aged ~24 Takes a Caltech doctorate on isotope separation and nuclear spins
• 1941 aged ~26 Marries Frances H. Brown, and spends the war on radar bombing systems at Bell Labs
• 1951 aged ~36 Conceives a way to make an intense, coherent beam
• 1953 aged ~38 Builds the first ammonia maser at Columbia With James P. Gordon and Herbert J. Zeiger.
• 1958 aged ~43 Publishes Infrared and Optical Masers with Arthur Schawlow Gordon Gould had notarized a rival notebook in November 1957.
• 1964 aged ~49 Shares the Nobel Prize in Physics with Basov and Prokhorov
• 1966 aged ~51 Chairs the NASA science advisory committee for Apollo He held the post through 1970.
• January 27, 2015 aged 99 Dies at 99, months after his last visit to the Berkeley physics department

• Vannevar Bush 1890–1974
  Built the differential analyzer and directed U.S. wartime research while proposing the Memex concept. wartime science apparatus
• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. shared the search for life elsewhere
• Enrico Fermi 1901–1954
  Italian-American physicist who built the first nuclear reactor and won the Nobel Prize in Physics. physics contemporary
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. physics contemporary
• Jack Kilby 1923–2005
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit, a foundational innovation that made modern electronics possible. fellow inventor in a priority fight