Charles H. Townes
Charles Hard Townes (July 28, 1915 – January 27, 2015) was an American physicist.[4][5] 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.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov.[3][15][16] Townes was an adviser to the United States Government, meeting every US president from Harry S. Truman (1945) to Bill Clinton (1999).
Charles H. Townes
January 27, 2015 (aged 99)
- Comstock Prize in Physics (1958)
- John J. Carty Award (1961)
- Stuart Ballantine Medal (1962)
- Young Medal and Prize (1963)
- Nobel Prize in Physics (1964)
- IEEE Medal of Honor (1967)
- Wilhelm Exner Medal (1970)[1]
- ForMemRS (1976)[2]
- Earle K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy (1977)
- National Medal of Science (1982)
- Lomonosov Gold Medal (2000)
- Templeton Prize (2005)
- Vannevar Bush Award (2006)
- SPIE Gold Medal (2010)
- Golden Goose Award (2012)
He directed the US 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.
Townes was religious[17] and believed that science and religion are converging to provide a greater understanding of the nature and purpose of the universe.
Early life and education[edit]
Townes had German, Scottish, English, Welsh, Huguenot French, and Scotch Irish ancestry,[18] Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of Henry Keith Townes (1876–1958), an attorney, and Ellen Sumter Townes (née Hard; 1881–1980).[19] His brother, Henry Keith Townes Jr., (January 20, 1913 – May 2, 1990), was a renowned entomologist who was a world authority on Ichneumon wasps. Charles earned his B.S. in Physics and B.A. in Modern Languages at Furman University, where he graduated in 1935.[4] Townes completed work for the Master of Arts degree in physics at Duke University in 1937,[20] and then began graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, from which he received a Ph.D. degree in 1939.[21] During World War II, he worked on radar bombing systems at Bell Labs.[3][4]
Astrophysics[edit]
Galactic Center[edit]
The Galactic Center of the Milky Way had long puzzled astronomers, and thick dust obscures the view of it in visible light. During the mid to late 1970s, Townes together with Eric Wollman, John Lacy, Thomas Geballe and Fred Baas studied Sagittarius A, the H II region at the Galactic Center, at infrared wavelengths. They observed ionized neon gas swirling around the center at such velocities that the mass at the very center must be approximately equal to that of 3 million suns.[29] Such a large mass in such a small space implied that the central object (the radio source Sagittarius A*) contains a supermassive black hole. Sagittarius A* was one of the first black holes detected; subsequently its mass has been more accurately determined to be 4.3 million solar masses.
Shapes and sizes of stars[edit]
Townes's last major technological creation was the Infrared Spatial Interferometer with Walt Fitelson, Ed Wishnow and others. The project combined three mobile infrared detectors aligned by lasers that study the same star. If each telescope is 10 meters from the other, it creates an impression of a 30-meter lens.[30] Observations of Betelgeuse, a red giant in the shoulder of the constellation Orion, found that it is increasing and decreasing in size at the rate of 1% per year, 15% over 15 years. ISI produces extremely high angular and spatial resolution. The technology is also playing an important role in the search for extraterrestrial life in collaborations with Dan Werthimer of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).