Charles H. Townes

Charles Hard Townes was born July 28, 1915, and trained as a physicist at a moment when quantum mechanics was still new enough to be strange. He obtained the fundamental patent for the maser in the 1950s and shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov for the theory and application that made both masers and lasers possible. He advised every U.S. president from Truman to Clinton and directed the Science and Technology Advisory Committee for the Apollo lunar landing program. In 1967 he joined UC Berkeley and pivoted to astrophysics, where his program discovered the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Townes was religious and spent his later years arguing that science and religion were converging toward the same truths. He died January 27, 2015.