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"I am much honored to be chosen for the Drake Award, and very pleased to be associated with the important search for extraterrestrial life. The name Drake also has special meanings to me. There is Sir Francis Drake, there is the Drake equation, and I have a grandson named Drake whose graduation I will attend 2 days after receiving this notable award."
Charles Townes was born into the rapidly shrinking world of 1915, when communication and transportation advances were stitching together continents. The newly opened Panama Canal linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; the world's first transcontinental telephone calls connected the East and West coasts of the United States. For a child growing up close to nature in the rural south, however, the world was huge and ripe with things to discover.
As a young boy, the future Nobel laureate played along the stream and in the fields of his family's 20-acre farm in Greenville, South Carolina. He collected things—butterflies, shells, and leaves, and counted among his childhood friends "the lizards, birds, rocks and insects around [my] home." Townes liked to turn over the rocks and pebbles to see what lived beneath them, what things others may have overlooked.
In adulthood, Townes would come to view certain molecules as friends, developing a deeply intuitive understanding of their behavior. This understanding helped lead to insights behind many of his innovations, including his most famous, the laser.
In the 1960s when Dr. Frank Drake and a small handful of scientists launched the scientific search for radio transmissions from distant solar systems, evidence of technological civilizations on worlds orbiting their suns, Townes found himself wondering whether an important stone had been left unturned.
By concentrating major efforts on radio waves, his colleagues were overlooking the full communication potential of the electromagnetic spectrum. Light waves, in particular interested Townes who wrote his first paper on optical SETI (OSETI) in 1961. For years, the inventor of the laser urged SETI scientists to consider optical waves when searching for transmissions. Decades later advances in technology caught up with Townes’ insight. At a landmark series of workshops (1998-99) convened by the SETI Institute to chart the future of SETI, scientists were primed to embrace Townes' foresighted OSETI approach.
Today, a number of serious and rigorous optical SETI searches are underway at the University of California's Lick Observatory, Harvard, and MIT, among others. The blossoming of OSETI as a search tool that complements radio searches is a direct result of Townes' unwavering support and championing of the method, and has earned the insightful scientist the 2002 Frank Drake Award for Innovation in SETI and Life in the Universe Research.
The SETI Institute's Frank Drake recently met with his fellow SETI pioneer in Townes' office library at the University of California, Berkeley where they discussed innovation, the Nobel Prize and the importance of following one's own path.
When Drake noted that his colleague's rural background seemed unusual for a scientist, Townes demurred. He explained that in the early days of physics, leaders in the field were often people like himself, self-reliant products of small towns. Growing up on a farm, he continued, provided many opportunities to tinker with machinery, and there were always things that needed fixing, farm equipment and tools. These proved valuable background experiences for a budding experimentalist whose engineering skills were crucial to his seminal work with lasers.
Townes left the world of Greenville determined to become a scientist. He completed a master's degree in physics at Duke University in 1936 and a Ph.D. in physics at the California Institute of Technology three years later. With academic appointments few and far between during the Depression, Townes signed on to Bell Laboratories from 1939-1947, where he contributed valuable research to the United States' war effort. While the job in private industry had been a concession to the prevailing economy, Townes made the most of his years at Bell Labs. As he explained to Drake, what initially seems like failure can often lead to success. The years at Bell Labs honed his engineering skills and prepared him for his work with masers and lasers.
Eager to pursue his own research interests, Townes joined the academic staff of Columbia University in 1948 as an Associate Professor. He would remain at Columbia until 1961, eventually becoming Chairman of the Physics Department. While at Columbia, Townes developed the maser. With characteristic confidence in his work, Townes remained unswayed by the pessimism of his colleagues towards maser research. Townes' persistence paid off, garnering him the 1964 Nobel Prize "for fundamental work in quantum electronics which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle."
Today, Townes continues to explore the world beneath the unturned stone, scrutinizing celestial objects for new discoveries. Since 1988, he has used an array of moveable telescopes for obtaining very high angular resolution of astronomical objects at infrared wavelengths by spatial interferometry. During their coversation, Townes proudly described the telescope’s schematics to his intrigued fellow astronomer.
As Drake and Townes concluded their discussion, Townes shared three key pieces of advice for young scientists as they contemplate their career ahead:
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First, try to do the things that you enjoy most, that you think are important. If you enjoy them you’re most likely to do them well.
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Also, listen to your peers and older people. Think about what they are saying, but don’t necessarily believe them—don’t let them tell you what to do. Think hard about what you feel may be new, original and valuable, let others criticize you and listen, but don’t take them too seriously.
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Finally, don’t be too worried about failure. Do exploration. Do things that are new and different. Sure, some of them are going to fail, but new and different things are likely to pay off most. Be willing to take some chances."
Townes' advice profoundly encapsulates a formula for life that has served the scientist well and offers a beacon to those who follow.
*The Drake Award is the latest in a long and impressive list of distinctions that includes (in addition to the Nobel Prize), the National Medal of Science, the National Academy of Sciences' Comstock Prize , and memberships in the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of London, the Max Planck Society, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame.
All images are made courtesy of Dr. Charles Townes
June 5, 2003