今年是激光发明50年，中国物理学会秋季学术会议的Keynote Speaker，Berkeley的沈元壤教授（Prof. Yuen-Ron Shen）报告的题目就是：Fifty Years of Laser Science。

 

激光——“Laser”是Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation的简称。因为叫得多了，原来的名字反而没有很多人记得了。

 

回顾一下激光发明的历史，也是很有意思的。据因为激光而获得Nobel奖的Charles Hard Townes（他的citation 是：for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle）回忆，第一个激光器的发明者Theodore Maiman开始把他的文章投到PRL（1960年6月），但是被当时的主编Simon Pasternak“拒了”（turned down）！后来Maiman改投Nature，在1960年8月发表：

 

Theodore Maiman made the first laser operate on 16 May 1960 at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California, by shining a high-power flash lamp on a ruby rod with silver-coated surfaces. He promptly submitted a short report of the work to the journal Physical Review Letters, but the editors turned it down. Some have thought this was because the Physical Review had announced that it was receiving too many papers on masers—the longer-wavelength predecessors of the laser—and had announced that any further papers would be turned down. But Simon Pasternak, who was an editor of Physical Review Letters at the time, has said that he turned down this historic paper because Maiman had just published, in June 1960, an article on the excitation of ruby with light, with an examination of the relaxation times between quantum states, and that the new work seemed to be simply more of the same. Pasternack's reaction perhaps reflects the limited understanding at the time of the nature of lasers and their significance. Eager to get his work quickly into publication, Maiman then turned to Nature, usually even more selective than Physical Review Letters, where the paper was better received and published on 6 August.

 

这位第一个激光器的发明者运气继续不好：虽然几次被提名Nobel奖，但是到最后也没有获奖——尽管激光的发明给我们的科学和日常生活带来的革命。

 

究其原因，也许是因为在50年代初，Maser（Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation）已经发明——Laser只是波长更短而已。

 

沈元壤教授说：

 

Maser的发明者Townes当时在Columbia大学工作。因为实验屡屡失败，他那时的“老板”——两位Nobel奖得主，Rabi和Kusch找到他的办公室，严肃地说：“You should stop the work you are doing. It isn’t going to work. Your are wasting money. Just stop!”

 

另一位更著名的大人物，Niels Bohr说得更直接：“But this is not possible!”

 

如果还嫌不够，那么另一位大人物添上一句：“That can’t be right!”

 

这最后一位的名字：John Von Neumann！

 

下面的照片就是沈先生报告中有关的那一张PPT slide。

激光（Maser- Laser）就是这样诞生的——尽管多次的失败和这么多大人物的反对和质疑。

 

和任何真正的创新一样！

 

 

【Townes本人是这样回忆他的两位“老板”和另一位Nobel奖得主同事的：

 

Now, our work at Columbia was in one of the Joint Services laboratories set up immediately after the war. The three services, army, navy, air force, were jointly supporting this laboratory which included Willis Lamb, who got a Nobel prize for his microwave work on hydrogen, Polykarp Kusch, who got a Nobel prize for his work on magnetic moments, and I. I. Rabi, who already had a Nobel prize, and myself. I guess that was the four of us. It was an unusually strong laboratory and we worked together reasonably well. We had very different ideas in many cases, but nevertheless we managed to work together really pretty harmoniously even though we did disagree with each other scientifically at times. The disagreements were actually often helpful. It was well-enough supported that we didn't have to keep applying for new funds to do this or that; we had money coming in as just a block grant every year. An excellent way to work, I felt. We just divided up the money among ourselves.】

 

有兴趣的读者，可以参看他的访谈回忆：

 

A Life in Physics: Bell Telephone Laboratories and World War II; Columbia University and the Laser; MIT and Government Service; California and Research in Astrophysics

 

 

 

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