Charles Hard Townes (born July 28, 1915) is an American Nobel Prize-winning physicist and educator. Townes is 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. The Japanese FM Towns computer and game console is named in his honour.
Personal life
Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of Ellen Hard and Henry Keith Townes, an attorney.
Research
Theorists like Niels Bohr and John von Neumann doubted that it was possible to create such a thing as a maser. Nobel laureates Isidor Isaac Rabi and Polykarp Kusch received the budget for their research from the same source as Townes; three months before the first successful experiment they tried to stop him: "Look, you should stop the work you are doing. It isn't going to work. You know it's not going to work, we know it's not going to work, we know it's not going to work. You're wasting money, Just stop!".
Science and religion
A member of the United Church of Christ, Townes considers that "science and religion [are] quite parallel, much more similar than most people think and that in the long run, they must converge".