Charles Townes

Townes had German, Scottish, English, Welsh, Huguenot French, and Scotch Irish ancestry, Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of Henry Keith Townes (1876–1958), an attorney, and Ellen Sumter Townes (Hard; 1881–1980).

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 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.

Charles earned his B.S. in Physics and B.A. in Modern Languages at Furman University, where he graduated in 1935.

Townes completed work for the Master of Arts degree in physics at Duke University in 1937, and then began graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, from which he received a Ph.D. degree in 1939.

During World War II, he worked on radar bombing systems at Bell Labs.

Townes married Frances H. Brown, an activist for the homeless, during 1941.

They lived in Berkeley, California and had four daughters, Linda Rosenwein, Ellen Anderson, Carla Kessler, and Holly Townes.

Townes was an adviser to the United States Government, meeting every US president from Harry S. Truman (1945) to Bill Clinton (1999).

He directed the US government's Science and Technology Advisory Committee for the Apollo lunar landing program.

In 1950, Townes was appointed professor at Columbia University.

He served as executive director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory from 1950 to 1952.

In 1951, Townes conceived a new way to create intense, precise beams of coherent radiation, for which he invented the acronym maser (for Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation).

When the same principle was applied to higher frequencies, the term laser was used (the word "light" substituting for the word "microwave").

He was Chairman of the Physics Department from 1952 to 1955.

During 1953, Townes, James P. Gordon, and Herbert J. Zeiger built the first ammonia maser at Columbia University.

This device used stimulated emission in a stream of energized ammonia molecules to produce amplification of microwaves at a frequency of about 24.0 gigahertz.

From 1959 to 1961, he was on leave of absence from Columbia University to serve as vice president and director of research of the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit organization, which advised the U.S. government and was operated by eleven universities.

Between 1961 and 1967, Townes served as both provost and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov.

For his creation of the maser, Townes along with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov received the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Townes also developed the use of masers and lasers for astronomy, was part of a team that first discovered complex molecules in space, and determined the mass of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

Between 1966 and 1970, he was chairman of the NASA Science 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 and believed that science and religion are converging to provide a greater understanding of the nature and purpose of the universe.

Then, during 1967, he was appointed as a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained for almost 50 years; his status was as professor emeritus by the time of his death during 2015.

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.

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.

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.

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).

During 2002–2003, Townes served as a Karl Schwarzschild Lecturer in Germany and the Birla Lecturer and Schroedinger Lecturer in India.

Townes is one of the 20 American recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a letter addressed to President George W. Bush in May 2008, urging him to "reverse the damage done to basic science research in the Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency funding for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The Galactic Center of the Milky Way had long puzzled astronomers, and thick dust obscures the view of it in visible light.