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Lasers at Thirty
| Article
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16328 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1989 |
3,470 Words |
| Author
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Kumar Patel and Richard R. Freeman
Kumar Patel is the executive director of the Research,
Materials Science, Engineering and Academic Division at AT&T
Bell Laboratories. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1961, where
he began his career by carrying out research in the field of
gas lasers. He has made numerous seminal contributions in
several fields, including gas lasers, nonlinear optics,
molecular spectroscopy, pollution detection, and laser
surgery. Richard R. Freeman is head of the Electromagnetic
Phenomena Research Department at AT &T Bell Laboratories. He
has conducted research on lasers since joining Bell
Laboratories in 1976, recently specializing in high-powered
lasers. |
"In some way they [the Martians] are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute nonconductivity…. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition…. However, it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. What is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, that explodes into steam."
With these words from The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells both alarmed and amazed his turn-of-the-century readers with his vision of a light source so powerful, so vastly different in its very essence that the earth would never again be the same. But, however spectacular Wells imagined the Martians' light ray to be, he would have been completely speechless to witness the realization of his fantasy. For the modern laser has become not only the awesomely potent weapon of destruction envisaged in War of the Worlds, but the source of a vast number of new technologies as well. The growth in these technologies has been staggering, so much so that virtually all major sectors of our economy, including science, technology, medicine, and defense, are now quite dependent upon light from some kind of laser.
Lasers Are Everywhere
The unmistakable sign that a new technology has been thoroughly integrated into everyday life and accepted by the public is that it rapidly gets to be difficult to list all the products or services in which the technology plays a significant role. And so it is for the laser: Indeed, while most of us could point to the price scanner at the supermarket as an example of a laser application in our everyday lives, few would volunteer that the laser transmits an ever-increasing fraction of our long distance phone calls, prints the majority of computer hard copy, or is the genie in the box that "reads" the digital code on compact discs in our stereo systems. From an abstract theoretical concept conceived at Bell Telephone Laboratories by Arthur Schalow and Charles Towns only 30 years ago, the laser has developed into a tool so ubiquitous it would be hard to imagine life in our hi-tech world without it.
The laser's first practical impact was in the realm of experimental scientific investigation, where it provided researchers with a source of light that could not only identify types of atoms and molecules and initiate chemical reactions but, in general probe, measure, and modify the fundamental
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