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Charles Hard Townes

File:Charles_Townes.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

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Charles Hard Townes

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Also known as Charles H. Townes

20th-century American physicist

OverviewAI-generated

Charles Hard Townes was born on July 28, 1915, and died on January 27, 2015. He was recognized in the Royal Society collection, the Nobel Laureates collection, the Nobel Physics collection, the National Inventors Hall Of Fame collection, the American Academy Arts Sciences collection, and the National Medal Of Science collection.

He received one Nobel Prize. His Erdős number is 6.

Synthesized by Vinony from 11 facts across 3 sources: Wikidata, Nobel Prize, Vinony collections. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Nobel Prize

  • The Nobel Prize in Physics1964

    “for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle”

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Wikidata facts

Instance of
human
Given name
Charles
Gender
male
Citizenship
United States
Place of birth
Greenville
Place of death
Oakland
Occupation
inventor
Employer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Languages spoken
English language
Notable work
maser
Field of work
physics
Image
Charles Townes.jpg
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member of
JASON
date of death
2015-01-27
Commons category
Charles Townes
date of birth
1915-07-28
Erdős number
6
nominated for
Nobel Prize in Physics
name in native language
Charles H. Townes
maintained by WikiProject
WikiProject Mathematics
interested in
physics
Sources (6)

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Encyclopedic overview

Charles Hard Townes (July 28, 1915 – January 27, 2015) was an American physicist. Townes worked on the theory and application of the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated with both maser and laser devices. He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov. Townes was an adviser to the U.S. Government, meeting every President from Harry S. Truman (1945) to Bill Clinton (1999).

Townes directed the U.S. government's Science and Technology Advisory Committee for the Apollo lunar landing program. After becoming a professor of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967, he began an astrophysical program that produced several important discoveries, for example, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Charles Hard Townes” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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