Charles Townes Interview (page: 5 / 8) Inventor of the Maser & Laser	Print Interview

After you worked so hard on the development of the maser, you took a break in 1955, a sabbatical. Did you feel like you needed to refresh yourself? Were you tired or overstimulated?

Charles Townes: I don't think I felt particularly tired, but I had planned for a long time to take a sabbatical leave. With a sabbatical, part of the reason for taking it is to think through what you're doing, whether you're doing the most interesting things, whether there's something else that would be still nicer, and more interesting, to make new contacts with a different group of scientists, and sort of refresh yourself intellectually. I wasn't physically tired. But I had been chairman of the department for three years. I had just finished a book on microwave spectroscopy, and I felt microwave spectroscopy had reached a point where I believe it was more or less mature, so far as the world of physics was concerned. We understood all the principles. It was very important for chemistry, and further study of molecules, but I felt we understood the principles, and Schawlow and I wrote this book and completed it. And I felt this was a time to stop and think about what I was doing. I took a sabbatical, and we had a nice trip abroad, spent some time in Europe, some time in France. I made a point of saying I'm not necessarily going to continue doing the things I'm doing. I'm going to think about what other fields, maybe what I ought to do. I looked into astronomy, for example. I had always been interested in astronomy. I thought about doing astronomy, and I associated with some astronomers in Paris, but also associated with people doing spectroscopy, and other things there, at the École Normale Superieure in Paris. And, as frequently happens, you run into somebody that sort of starts another train of thought.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I had a student who had gone over to Paris to work with Professor (Alfred) Kastler. Kastler I knew very well, and my student had gone to work with him in a post-doctoral position. And after I got there I ran into this student, and he told me what he was doing. He had found that he could orient electrons in silicon, a semiconductor. He could orient electrons in their spins in one direction, and they stayed there for a long time, and didn't lose their direction. I recognized, well, that's like an excited molecule. You can fix them in one direction by putting them in a magnetic field, then they're like little magnets, you can produce energy. If they flip in the other direction, they will give you energy, and that's a way of making another kind of maser, and particularly a maser which would amplify well out of a solid, rather than this beam of molecules. So running into him, we talked about it. I said, "You know, we should try that. We should try and see how far we can get." I just had a few months in Paris. So he and I and other French physicists worked on that. Now that also combined my interest in astronomy, because the reason for getting a very sensitive amplifier in the microwave region, for me, was to do more sensitive astronomy, radio astronomy, detecting microwaves from outer space more sensitively. That was my goal at that time.

I thought that was very interesting, while I'm there in Paris I must look at that. But in the meantime I had looked at a wide variety of other things and other possibilities that were terribly interesting too. And was debating with myself what to do.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I went on to Japan, and I had a colleague there who had worked with me at Columbia. And again, running into him, I talked with him, and I ran into a biologist that I had known from Columbia University, he was spending a year over there. And I was puzzling over how to figure out exactly how much noise there was in this amplifier. And you create energy, and you take away energy, and this interchange of energy with waves and atomic molecular energy. And he said, "Oh, you know that's somewhat like the microbes that I've been working with. I've tried to work out equations of how microbes live and die and are created, and hence how they develop." And I said, "Oh, you know, that's exactly the same process that occurs with a wave." You create a photon, you destroy a photon, you have a probability that new ones will be created, so you have a generation of photons that grows just like a generation of microbes that grows or dies. You have fluctuations in the numbers. So I looked at those equations, I worked on them. There was a Japanese person there who was a good mathematician, and we talked about it with two of my Japanese colleagues. We worked that out to see just how well the amplifier would work. I knew it would work very well, but I didn't have a good quantitative picture. We worked it all out there in Japan. Again, by running into the right people, ideas get suggested and exchanged and so by the time I came back to the United States, I had the amplifier all worked out. And you know, this is really what I would like to do. I want to build this amplifier, and do radio astronomy, because I can do radio astronomy in a new way now.

So that trip did produce some new ideas in the same field, actually. It also kind of assured me that this this was really the best thing for me to do at that point.

It sounds like you're thinking about your work all the time. Is that true? Do you walk around mulling over these problems?

Charles Townes: Yes, that's true.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think anyone who's doing creative work frequently does some of their best work in off moments, when they're thinking about things. You have to be interested enough that it occupies your mind. And sometimes in the shower, or walking along the street, or sitting on a park bench, or anything else, those are times when a little different slant on things appears, and you suddenly have an idea, so that these off moments, thinking about things, are very important. To me, if someone isn't thinking about their research outside the laboratory, then they're not really interested. You have to be really wrapped up in the subject to really try to master it. And frequently, the new ideas come in those off moments, when your mind is maybe even in a dream. And there's some famous ideas that have come in dreams. And sometimes some ideas have come in dreams, and they're wonderful and right, and sometimes you wake up and say, "Oh no, that really isn't so." But it's the relaxation of the mind in the off moments, looking at things in a different way, that frequently produces those radically new ideas.

We've even heard of mathematicians and scientists finding solutions in their dreams.

Charles Townes: (Friedrich August) Kekulé is the most famous example of that. He was trying to figure out how a carbon could make the molecules that it did. He was sitting by his fireplace, kind of dreaming, and he sort of visualized snakes, growing up and biting their tails, and making a circle. He said, "Ah! that's the carbon ring!" And that's how the carbon ring was discovered. That's a very famous case.

Stravinsky claimed that his wind octet came to him in a dream.

Charles Townes: I think that's typical of everyone, regardless of the field. You're intensely interested, you think about it in all kinds of ways, and in off moments, frequently, great ideas occur.

What qualities do you think are necessary for a fine scientist?

Charles Townes: That's a very interesting question. Because science is done in many different ways and many different styles, and many different approaches. And you find people who are very non-mathematical and yet are able to visualize and do things and invent things and do very good science. And they go about it one way. Other people go about it in a completely different way. So science, if we're going to explore it well, we need all kinds of different approaches, different people. Everybody in a sense has to be smart, I suppose you could say, but it's not the kind of smartness that everybody would judge. It's not just being very quick with repartee or something like that. Obviously very verbal, or something like this. It's a very different kind of game. And I suppose the one thing that is most important of all is intense interest. You can't do anything much in science unless you really are interested and want to do it. But exactly how you get ahead in science or discover the right things, that's a highly personal thing, quite variable, and we need many different approaches. So, all I can say is you have to be interested, you have to work at it, think about it hard, keep at it, and talk with other people, share ideas, and bounce things around. That's the general way in which I think it's most likely to work.

You've said before that you have to be somewhat independent because you have to believe in your convictions. On the other hand, if you're too much of a loner, you could become trapped in your own ivory tower.

Charles Townes: If you're too much of a loner, then you lose what many other people have discovered and know. You want to know what they know, and to build on that, and they should know what you know, and be able to build on that. Also, just trying out ideas and talking about things, some chance comment may allow you to recognize something that the person making that comment hasn't recognized. It's an interaction which is also a field of discovery. Ideas come about in conversation, seeing somebody else's work, or thinking about it, looking at another approach. Some of it's a generation of ideas under new circumstances, some of it's the importance of knowing what science is presently known, to build on that. Otherwise you're just duplicating what other people have done already.

It sounds like you also have to be flexible and open-minded.

Charles Townes: Oh, that's completely right.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. You have to be determined. You have to be open-minded. You have to be willing to examine. You have to be willing to stand up by yourself and differ with people, but you have to be very self-critical at the same time, otherwise you can waste a lot of time. If you just want to be yourself, and be different from everybody else, and not self-examining, then you can waste a lot of time. You have to be very self-critical and honest with yourself, when you're right or wrong. At the same time be able to stand by what you think.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Integrity is important too, isn't it?

Charles Townes: Integrity is very important in science. Not fooling yourself, but also certainly not trying to fool other people. Other people will see through it in time. In science usually one can decide, and the community can decide eventually, whether somebody is right or wrong. And if you're wrong, you need to admit it. If you're wrong, you say, "I guess I misunderstood that. I didn't see through this." So you go on to something else. It's common to be wrong in science.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It's very important to be able to be wrong. That is, you want to be able to stand up against criticism, or people who differ with you. You want to be able to take chances. You also want to be able to recognize when you're wrong. And you're going to be wrong some of the time, and it doesn't hurt a scientist to be wrong, especially if he can recognize it. If he recognizes it first, that's great. If somebody else recognizes he's wrong and proves it to him, well then okay, you accept that. Yes, I was wrong. And so you go on and do something else. It's the sorting out of what's right and what isn't right, we do it all the time. And sure, we're wrong some of the time and we're right some of the time. But the fact that we can sort that out and decide is what's great about science. So you can continue to build on what is right, and when that's tested by other people, you may have to stand up against the community for some time, but eventually, other people will be able to decide whether you're right or wrong. Doing experiments and showing it, for one thing. Or doing the experiment and finding out it doesn't work. Then you know. You don't want to waste too much time on being wrong, you want to say, "Well all right, I was wrong, and what did I learn from that?" And go on and find a better way of doing things.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Have you had many painful setbacks in your career?

Charles Townes: Painful setbacks? I'm not sure I think of anything as painful.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I've made plenty of mistakes, I've had setbacks, made mistakes in that sense. I don't consider them setbacks. If I work for a while on something, and find out that my idea wasn't right, well okay. It's not exactly a setback, I've explored that path. Down that particular path doesn't lead anywhere, and so I've done something. To me it doesn't seem like a setback. It's a mistake, you might say. So I go off some other way, so it's certainly not painful. But I've done plenty of things that aren't right that I find out about, made missteps. The idea is to try to figure out the best thing to do, but stay self-critical. As soon as you find you're wrong, backtrack and do something else.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

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