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

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more