4 ms·

Small world; it seems like Mark's Dad worked with Charles Townes, inventor of the maser. I got to meet Dr. Demitrios Matsakis last year. He also worked with To

Small world; it seems like Mark's Dad worked with Charles Townes, inventor of the maser. I got to meet Dr. Demitrios Matsakis last year. He also worked with Townes and was the US Naval Observatory's Head of Time Services, helping advance the state of the art in time synchronization during his tenure. It seems like there's a generation slowly fading away who have stories of a different era, where massive new achievements in physics and earth sciences came year after year. It doesn't feel as frequent these days, but maybe that's due to living in the now, where history hasn't yet judged what were great or mediocre discoveries?

toyg 3y ago
It's also that those discoveries brought turning-points in what we traditionally see as history (wars, epidemics, etc). Inventing CPUs, RAM, hard-disks, and spreadsheets, has probably been as influential, on human development, as inventing a couple of terrifying weapons; but they came staggered, as progressive refinements rather than "aha" moments, and they altered our parable in the background as a slow burn, rather than in a big flash...
mark_l_watson 3y ago
I remember Charles Townes. My Dad thought very highly of him: he was wildly creative in what he built, and also things he just thought of building. Many decades ago when my older brother graduated from optometry school, my brother was unhappy to hear my Dad talking effusively about an idea Townes had for building a vending machine like device to produce both eye prescriptions and glasses.
tobinfricke 3y ago
I attended an undergraduate seminar by Charles Townes sometime around 1999-2000 at UC Berkeley, on laser interferometry, and it was the first time I heard about LIGO. It set a little seed in my mind, so that when my future PhD advisor walked into the classroom where I was teaching undergraduate lab at University of Rochester and asked whether I'd like to work on LIGO -- I agreed immediately.

toyg 3y ago

It's also that those discoveries brought turning-points in what we traditionally see as history (wars, epidemics, etc). Inventing CPUs, RAM, hard-disks, and spreadsheets, has probably been as influential, on human development, as inventing a couple of terrifying weapons; but they came staggered, as progressive refinements rather than "aha" moments, and they altered our parable in the background as a slow burn, rather than in a big flash...

mark_l_watson 3y ago

I remember Charles Townes. My Dad thought very highly of him: he was wildly creative in what he built, and also things he just thought of building. Many decades ago when my older brother graduated from optometry school, my brother was unhappy to hear my Dad talking effusively about an idea Townes had for building a vending machine like device to produce both eye prescriptions and glasses.

tobinfricke 3y ago

I attended an undergraduate seminar by Charles Townes sometime around 1999-2000 at UC Berkeley, on laser interferometry, and it was the first time I heard about LIGO. It set a little seed in my mind, so that when my future PhD advisor walked into the classroom where I was teaching undergraduate lab at University of Rochester and asked whether I'd like to work on LIGO -- I agreed immediately.