Prizes: Split Award

It began on a park bench. Physicist Charles Hard Townes was idly admiring nearby azaleas while he puzzled over the problems of generating microwaves.

Suddenly, it occurred to him that molecules and atoms are nature’s original broadcasters. They transmit on their own characteristic frequencies whenever they change from one energy state to another. Why not put nature, instead of vacuum tubes, to work? Last week, 13 years later, Townes’s answer to that question won him half the Nobel Prize in physics. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences called his achievement a triumph of “quantum electronics,” which was another way of saying that Townes’s work had pointed the way toward masers (an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). The other half of the $53,000 payoff went to Drs.

Aleksandr M. Prochorov and Nikolai G. Basov, who independently developed a somewhat similar maser at Moscow’s Lebedev Institute of Physics.

Wide Variety. Working half the world apart, the maser men learned how to use radio microwaves to induce molecules and atoms to give up their stored energy. That newly released energy starts a sort of chain reaction, and the amplified electronic wave that results has since been tamed into a powerful scientific tool. “Masers,” says Dr. Townes, “give us one more control over electromagnetic waves, including radio waves and light waves. We have used them to develop an atomic clock which is very precise; in 30,000 years it would gain or lose one second.” Now that scientists have learned to use Townes’s technique to build lasers (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), they are moving into fields as varied as welding and surgery.

That very variety, as much as anything else, also characterizes Townes. Now provost of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he might well be teaching in the humanities rather than science. He was a whiz kid at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., where he spent much of his time studying languages. He still has some working competence in French, German, Spanish, Greek, Russian and Latin. But eventually he settled for science. Now, even the demands of his administrative job and his work in the laboratory must share time with mountain climbing, skindiving, and the raising of African violets.

Proper Share. “The Russians managed to weasel their way into that one,” said Townes’s loyal wife in an interview on WNEW, a Manhattan radio station. “They don’t deserve it.” But her scientific husband was more scientifically detached. “They are fine scientists,” he said. “They have done important work in this field and quite properly share in the prize.”