Word: townesed
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It began on a park bench. Physicist Charles Hard Townes was idly admiring nearby azaleas while he puzzled over the problems of generating microwaves.
Suddenly, it occurred to him that molecules and atoms are nature's original broadcasters. They transmit on their own characteristic frequencies whenever they change from one energy state to another. Why not put nature, instead of vacuum tubes, to work? Last week, 13 years later, Townes's answer...
Wide Variety. Working half the world apart, the maser men learned how to use radio microwaves to induce molecules and atoms to give up their stored energy. That newly released energy starts a sort of chain reaction, and the amplified electronic wave that results has since been tamed into a...
That very variety, as much as anything else, also characterizes Townes. Now provost of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he might well be teaching in the humanities rather than science. He was a whiz kid at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., where he spent much of his time studying languages. He...
Townes said that he was "very pleased, honored, and excited." The physicist came to M.I.T. in 1961 after holding several federal posts.