Blog : Philosémitisme

16 mai 1960, Malibou, Californie

"The US physicist and engineer Theodore Maiman will be remembered for having invented the world's first working laser.

He demonstrated the device on May 16, 1960, at the Hughes Aircraft Company research laboratories in Malibu, California. Although the laser was small enough to fit into its inventor's hand, and although of very low power compared with later lasers, its short-lived beam had the brilliance of a million suns.

Theoretical work on lasers dated back to Einstein, and had been carried forward most notably by Charles Townes, Arthur Schawlow and Gordon Gould, but Maiman made the experimental breakthrough of using very short flashes of light to excite atoms in a synthetic ruby. He published his discovery in the British scientific journal Nature.

Townes, the winner of the Nobel prize in 1964 and an expert on the theory of masers ? which use not light but microwaves ? described Maiman's article as the ?most important per word' of any paper which Nature had published.  [...] In short, Maiman's invention significantly affected all our lives. And future lasers may play an important role in fusion reactors, allowing us to obtain almost unlimited power by fusing the nuclei of hydrogen atoms." Lire l'intégralité de l'article dans The Times (2007).

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