Skip to main content

The Laser Inventor - Theodore Maiman ****

While the memoirs of many scientists are probably best kept for family consumption, there are some breakthroughs where the story is sufficiently engaging that it can be fascinating to get an inside view on what really happened. Although Theodore Maiman's autobiographical book is not a slick, journalist-polished account, it is very effective at highlighting two significant narratives - how Maiman was able to construct the first ever laser, despite having far fewer resources than many of his competitors, and how 'establishment' academic physicists, particularly in the US, tried to minimise his achievement.

 On the straight autobiographical side, we get some early background and discover how Maiman combined degrees in electrical engineering and physics to have an unusually strong mix of the practical and the theoretical. Rather than go into academia after his doctorate, he went into industry - which seems to have been responsible for the backlash against his invention, which we'll come back to in a moment. In describing his route to creating the laser, Maiman doesn't cover up his own worries that he was using the wrong technology, but explains why he felt it was worth carrying on.

 What comes through is that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he combined a strong awareness of what was sensibly achievable - so avoided extremely corrosive high-temperature alkali metal gasses such as sodium and potassium, used in other labs at the time in an attempt to create a laser. Similarly, he kept away from cryogenically cooled solutions, which might have worked in a lab, but were totally impractical for most real-world applications. And rather than accept that, as many others argued, it would be impossible to used a ruby as the lasing material, he went ahead and proved them all wrong.

 When we hear his reaction to the 'establishment', Maiman can come across as bitter - but it was with good reason. He points out that 10 people were awarded Nobel Prizes linked to lasers... but the Nobel committee totally ignored the man who built the first laser - a bizarre decision. Almost as soon as Maiman's employer, the Hughes Corporation, announced the successful development of the laser, competitors who more part of the academic establishment, apparently sneering at Maiman's work in industry, tried to minimise his achievement and to suggest that others really 'invented' the laser, even though these designs were never made to to work. This counter-spin went on for decades. Although it's a sad story in some ways, the whole sordid business very much adds to the intriguing nature of the book.

 I've only one minor criticism, which is that Maiman, probably feeling defensive after this ridiculous carping from his competitors, does seem to slightly play down the contribution of his assistant. In describing how he came to use a camera flash type lamp, Maiman says 'I remembered reading an article about photographic strobe lamps, a camera's flash mechanism... I now had my "aha"!' But in Jeff Hecht's book on the development of the laser - which Maiman appears to endorse - we are told that Maiman's assistant Charlie Asawa looked into pulsed light sources and got the idea of using a photographic flash lamp from an office colleague, Leo Levitt, which he showed to Maiman. This doesn't in any way reduce Maiman's role as the inventor of the laser, it just misses out a little on an interesting part of the process.

 The Laser Inventor is an interesting and engaging peek into one of modern history of science and technology's most dramatic, far-reaching developments. It's even quite reasonably priced for a Springer hardback. Recommended.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

 
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Keep a Plane in the Sky - Alex Davies ****

If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human in...
Post a Comment
Read more

On the Equality of All Things - Carlo Rovelli ****

There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...
Post a Comment
Read more