Nicolaas Bloembergen

Nicolaas Bloembergen was born in the Netherlands on March 11, 1920, and became a Dutch-American physicist whose curiosity about light led him somewhere no one had mapped. He built the driving principles behind nonlinear optics, discovering that when you combine two or more laser beams, you can produce light at entirely different wavelengths - a trick that vastly expanded what laser spectroscopy could see. That work earned him a share of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics alongside Arthur Schawlow and Kai Siegbahn, the committee noting it had profoundly deepened our grasp of matter's makeup. He taught at Harvard for decades, later at the University of Arizona, and held the Lorentz Professorship at Leiden University in 1973. He died on September 5, 2017, leaving behind a field he'd founded with light.