Charles H. Townes
Charles H. Townes
Charles Hard Towneswas an American Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor. Townes was known for his work on the theory and application of the maser, on which he got the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics connected with both maser and laser devices. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhysicist
Date of Birth28 July 1915
CountryUnited States of America
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Science has faith. We make postulates. We can't prove those postulates, but we have faith in them.
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Science is exploration. The fundamental nature of exploration is that we don't know what's there. We can guess and hope and aim to find out certain things, but we have to expect surprises.
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I was very eager to produce an oscillator for short waves. I was doing science with microwaves, and I would get down to a few millimetres in wavelength, but I wanted to get shorter wavelengths; I wanted to get into the infra-red because I saw there was a lot more to be done there.
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I was brought up as Christian, and while my ideas have changed, I have always felt myself religiously oriented.
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Much public thinking follows a rut. The same thing is true in science. People get stuck and don't look in other directions.
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One of the things my family taught me - I think very important in religion and science - is that you must be ready to stand up for what you think. Decide what you really think is best, and stick with it.
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There is some truth to the idea that, in the fields of science, individual contributions of great significance are possible.
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We can't avoid age. However, we can avoid some aging. Continue to do things. Be active. Life is fantastic in the way it adjusts to demands; if you use your muscles and mind, they stay there much longer.
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It was strange, in a way, because there were no ideas involved in the laser that weren't already known by somebody 25 years before lasers were discovered. The ideas were all there; just, nobody put it together.
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Alfred Nobel really understood very well the necessary supra-natural character of the human enterprise.
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I don't think that science is complete at all. We don't understand everything, and one can see, within science itself, there are many inconsistencies. We just have to accept that we don't understand.
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In many cases, people who win a Nobel prize, their work slows down after that because of the distractions. Yes, fame is rewarding, but it's a pity if it keeps you from doing the work you are good at.
I knew I wanted to be a scientist. Which kind of scientist was the question.
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The development of science is basically a social phenomenon, dependent on hard work and mutual support of many scientists and on the societies in which they live.