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Charles Hard Townes was a 20th-century American physicist who made groundbreaking contributions to understanding and manipulating light and microwave radiation. His work laid the foundation for modern technologies including lasers and masers, which transformed fields ranging from telecommunications to medical surgery.
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Person · Open Library
- Born
- 1915
- Died
- 2015
- Works
- 13
Top works
- Microwave spectroscopy [by] C.H. Townes [and] A.L. Schawlow
- Circular of the Bureau of Standards No. 518
- The Galactic center
- A life in physics
- Making waves
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Article
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.
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1915 births2015 deaths20th-century American inventorsAmerican experimental physicistsAmerican fellows of the Royal SocietyAmerican Nobel laureatesAmerican nuclear physicistsAmerican people of French descentAmerican people of German descentAmerican people of Scotch-Irish descentAmerican spectroscopistsCalifornia Institute of Technology alumni