Thursday, March 10, 2005
Nobel laureate, Charles Townes wins 2005 Templeton Prize
Nobel laureate, Charles Townes wins 2005 Templeton Prize
Charles Townes, a University of California, Berkeley, professor who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1964 for his work in quantum electronics and then startled the scientific world by suggesting that religion and science were converging, was awarded the $1.5 million Templeton Prize for progress in spiritual knowledge Wednesday.
The co-inventor of the laser, Townes, 89, said no greater question faced humankind than discovering the purpose and meaning of life -- and why there is something rather than nothing in the cosmos.
"If you look at what religion is all about, it's trying to understand the purpose and meaning of our universe. Science tries to understand function and structures. If there is any meaning, structure will have a lot to do with any meaning," he said from New York. "In the long run they must come together."
It was the 1966 publication of his seminal article, “The Convergence of Science and Religion” in the IBM journal THINK, however, that established Townes as a unique voice - especially among scientists - that sought commonality between the two disciplines. Long before the concept of a relationship between scientific and theological inquiry became an accepted arena of investigation, his nonconformist viewpoint jumpstarted a movement that until then few had considered and even fewer comprehended. So rare was such a viewpoint at the time that Townes admitted in the paper that his position would be considered by many in both camps to be “extreme.” Nonetheless, he proposed, “their differences are largely superficial, and…the two become almost indistinguishable if we look at the real nature of each.”
Understanding the order in the universe and understanding the purpose in the universe are not identical, but they are also not very far apart.
When Charles Hard Townes suddenly figured out how to tame microwaves and, in the process, set the foundation for the development of masers and lasers, it changed the modern world. But, for Townes, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for his realization that day, it was also a moment that spoke to a larger truth, about how the power of revelation — not unlike that recorded in the scriptures — evidences the similarity of science and religion.
Born in 1915 on a farm in Greenville, South Carolina, to Ellen Hard Townes, a well-educated homemaker, and Henry Townes, an attorney, Townes grew up in a Baptist household that prized intellectual pursuits and vigorous, open-minded discussion of the Bible. His home, nestled near the Blue Ridge Mountains, presented the young boy with a world of biological diversity, one he eagerly explored.
His voracious curiosity and encouraging home life led Townes rapidly through the education system, skipping seventh grade and graduating at age 19 with a B.A. in modern languages and a B.S. in physics, summa cum laude, from Furman University, a Baptist college in Greenville. He went on to Duke University where he completed a Master of Arts in physics in 1936.
Intent on furthering his education, but lacking scholarship offers from MIT, Cornell, Chicago, or Princeton, Townes instead packed his belongings, along with $500 in savings, and took a bus to Pasadena to enroll at the California Institute of Technology. After three years there, he received his Ph.D. in physics with a thesis on isotope separation and nuclear spins in 1939.
Townes planned to stay in academia but, with job offers scarce — the Great Depression was still a crushing presence in the United States — he reluctantly accepted a position on the technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, one of the most vital arenas of cutting edge research. With the outbreak of World War II, he worked on radar bombing systems that could operate effectively under the severe humidity of the South Pacific.
While in New York, Townes met Frances H. Brown, a young woman who had traveled extensively and who served as social director of International House for graduate students. The two married in 1941.
After the war, Townes was named associate professor of physics at Columbia and soon met Arthur L. Schawlow, who had come to the university on a fellowship and became Townes’ research assistant. It was a fortuitous match: the two would soon combine their energies (and, coincidentally, become brothers-in-law) to make major advances in the field of microwave spectroscopy, including designing the maser and the laser.
In 1951, Townes, along with many other physicists, was attempting to figure out ways to use microwave spectroscopy to better examine molecular structure. As part of his research, he chaired a Navy-sponsored committee that sought to encourage research that might result in generation of waves shorter than those of current radar systems. It was a goal that had proven frustratingly elusive to Townes and like-minded researchers across the globe.
Early one spring morning before a committee meeting in Washington, D.C., Townes got up early but, finding the hotel restaurant not yet open, went outside and sat on a bench in Franklin Square. Alone on the bench, Townes wrestled with his research questions when, like a bolt from the blue, a solution popped into his head and he quickly jotted it down on a piece of paper.
That moment of revelation has been cited repeatedly by Townes during the past half century as a crystallization of how topics normally associated with religion or science — revelation, intuition, observation, faith, and aesthetics — can easily apply to both disciplines. Ironically, the bench where Townes conceived his groundbreaking insight was across the street from the site where Alexander Graham Bell experimented with sending messages on beams of light.
Townes’ discovery would lead to the first working maser in 1954 and soon after, in collaboration with brother-in-law Schawlow, to the invention of the laser. In 1955, Townes and Schawlow co-authored the influential book, Microwave Spectroscopy and, in 1960, the two shared a patent for the laser.
In 1961, Townes took another step into a future few had imagined. A year after Dr. Frank Drake and associates launched the first scientific search for radio transmissions from distant solar systems, Townes co-authored a paper with R. N. Schwartz in Nature that proposed using the optical spectrum for similar indications. More than 40 years later, optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (OSETI) are underway at observatories at Harvard, MIT, and the University of California, among others.
Three years later, in 1964, Townes received the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with two physicists from the Lebedev Institute in Moscow, Aleksander Prokhorov and Nikolai Basov, for “fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle.”
A major turning point in Townes’ career came in 1964, when members of the men’s Bible study group at Manhattan’s Riverside Church asked him to speak on the relationship between science and religion. Townes later recalled that he was selected for the talk because he was the only scientist they knew who regularly attended church. It was to be a turning point in the nascent movement to understand where these two disciplines might intersect.
As it happened, the lecture was heard by the editor of the journal THINK, published by IBM. Two years later he published an article by Townes based on the Riverside presentation. Although difficult to imagine now, publishing an article that even touched upon religion in a strictly scientific journal was a revolutionary idea. When the article was republished in Technology Review, MIT’s alumni journal, it caused something of a storm among some scientists who saw no room in their profession for anything remotely related to religion.
His venture into this fertile but unexplored area was accompanied by a number of top positions in academia. He was named provost and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, director of the Enrico Fermi International School of Physics in 1963, and, in 1967, university professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, a post he held until 1986. He also chaired or participated in numerous defense, space program, and science and technology policy committees and panels.
Townes’ background in military research came full circle in 1982, when he chaired a U.S. Defense Department committee advising the Reagan administration and successfully recommended against the widespread placement of the MX missile system.
Townes has solidified his leadership role in the dialogue at the boundary of science and religion with the publication of many papers, including “Science, values, and beyond,” in Synthesis of Science and Religion (1987), “On Science, and what it may suggest about us,” in Theological Education (1988), and “Why are we here; where are we going?” in The International Community of Physics, Essays on Physics (1997).
The American Institute of Physics Press published a collection of his writings, Making Waves, in 1995, and his book, How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist, a personal story illustrating the sociology of science and discovery, was published to great acclaim by Oxford University Press in 1999.
His lectures, too, have kept him at the forefront of the discussion. Most recently, he delivered the keynote address, “Do science and religion converge?” at the Second World Congress for the Synthesis of Science and Religion in Calcutta, India in 1997, and the lecture, “The Convergence of Science and Religion,” at the annual UNESCO meeting in Paris and at the American Scientific Affiliation annual meeting at Pepperdine University in California in 2002.
Townes holds more than two dozen honorary degrees and a trove of awards and honors. Now 89, a father of four and grandfather of six, he continues a vigorous schedule equal to the demands of his chosen path of inquiry, lecturing, writing and serving as Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California at Berkeley. He and his wife of 63 years reside in Berkeley.
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