The Laser Turns 50 74
sonicimpulse writes with news that tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of physicist Theodore Maiman's creation of the first operational laser.
"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 Pasternack, 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."
Happy Birthday Laser! (Score:5, Funny)
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but would you mind not pointing yourself at my eye's... You know you cause permanent damage. Maybe just point yourself at the floor and get the dog to chase after the spot...
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I like my friends like I like my lasers, neither can be stared at directly with the remaining eye.
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girls
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>> You're a good friend and I wish you all the best for the future.
P.S. You're really f-in' old!
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Yet...a string of dissapointments (Score:5, Funny)
Still no succesful integration with friggin' sharks... :(
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And I don't know who this "Maiman" guy is. Everybody knows the laser was invented by Dr. Parsons [youtube.com] at Cambridge University.
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Thirteen freakin' years! [imdb.com] Pretty soon (as in right now?) we'll be bragging about seeing it in the theater in the same breath as saying "Get off my lawn!"
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Goldfinger is 46 years old. The Bond Cutting Laser was referencing serious cutting-edge tech at the time!
Oh, no, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!
50 years, and still no portable death ray. (Score:5, Funny)
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almost.
Re:50 years, and still no portable death ray. (Score:5, Funny)
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It would be quite a challenge to make a laser-based death ray that performs as well as our current chemical-based death-dealing devices-- if you could make a battery to effectively supply a laser pistol, and weighs as much or less as the equivalent cordite, I sure as hell want one of those in my cellphone.
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Don't presently best batteries have energy densities comparable to many explosives already?
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Yes, but aside from hi-def films, DVDs, CDs, cutting tools, holograms, spectroscopy, acne cures, hair removal, LIDAR, surgical tools and the barcode scanner, what has the laser ever done for us?
Laser pointer (Score:1)
Hey laser (Score:5, Funny)
It's amazing, you don't look a day ove....
Oww, my eye!
Re:Hey laser (Score:4, Funny)
It's amazing, you don't look a day ove....
Oww, my eye!
Which no doubt spawned the usual "Do not look into laser beam with remaining eye" warning.
Re:Hey laser (Score:5, Funny)
I had a laser shot into my eye to reduce a blister on my retina (central serous retinopathy). It was all high tech, except they need to keep your head still while they press this apparatus against your eye. They had a frame to press your face against, but I could not hold myself still while they did that. The doctor supplemented the laser with a gorilla like nurse to pin my head to the frame with his hands.
Not the most dignified procedure, but it worked.
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You poor poohs! It sounds horrible. Thanks for sharing your stories of doctor trauma. i cannot stand to have my eyeballs touched -- squick!
The Future's so bright... (Score:2)
I remember... (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember the first article I saw about the laser. I'm not sure if it is was in Popular Science or Scientific American, but I remember that it was described as a solution without a problem. For years after it was invented no one had any idea of what to do with the damn thing.
Now, it seems like they are everywhere there is one in every CD, DVD, and Blue Ray drive. We use them to align everything along that nice straight line. We are testing laser laser weapons. We use them to remove hair and correct eyes. They are critical to many manufacturing processes including precision cutting. Not to mention the whole field of holography and holographic optical elements.
But, It took many years for people to even start imagining what the thing was good for. And, even longer for the technology to get to where they could be used for practical applications. The history of the laser is a perfect study in how a really new idea develops into a useful technology. After 50 years we are only seeing the beginning of the application of the Laser.
Got to love it.
Stonewolf
Re:I remember... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the key innovation (from a consumer point of view) was the laser diode. Whilst some early laser disc players used gas lasers, it was the laser diode that enabled the CD player and all the other consumer electronics applications you describe.
Re:Recent invention (Score:4, Interesting)
I know the above comment is modded flamebait because of the stupid note about nuking Japan, but he's completely right about the lateness of the laser's invention. The laser could have been invented in the 1930's, and very nearly was! [ico-optics.org] Ali Javan himself, the inventor of the ubiquitous (or, at least, once ubiquitous in the 80's and 90's) helium neon gas laser said he would've almost certainly invented it in 1938 [farhangsara.com] had he been around then. It is an accident of history that the laser took another 25 years to invent after most of the underlying science ("negative absorption", coherence, etc) were understood.
Yes.... (Score:2)
I once saw a detailed analysis, written a few years after WWII, that showed in great detail that every technology needed to build a V2 missile was in existence by 1910. But, the V2 didn't go into operation until the 1940s and development started more than 10 years earlier.
Now we have the laser as an example of another technology that could have been invented 30 to 40 years earlier. But, in fact, neither of them was invented earlier.
The point is that first you have to imagine that something is possible, and
No, not quite. (Score:2)
The laser could have been invented in the 1930's, and very nearly was!
There are many inventions that could have been made "earlier", but in most cases, either the theory or some other supporting technology wasn't there yet. Somebody actually built and patented a FET-like transistor in the 1920s, but it's not clear that it ever worked. Lacking both ultrapure crystals and underlying theory, the best they could have done back then was to build a flaky device that sometimes worked, like a "crystal radio"
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You have to realize that experimental physics needed lasers. for a lot of things (measurements suddenly got more precise).
CDs are just an application of precise measurements.
High speed internet is here because instead of radio waves we can use visible light (but the basic idea is still to send information through a wave).
It is however true that it takes time to bring various pieces of information together, and mankind can probably still progress a lot just by being able to properly connect the dots that are
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Well I guess it found a few, huh?
Construction levels
Tattoo removal
Drilling through printed circuit boards
LASIK
LIDAR
amusing cats and their owners
LASERIUM
office printers
lithography
showing someone where a celestial object is
particle counters
inertial confinement nuclear fusion
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I'm not sure if it is was in Popular Science or Scientific American, but I remember that it was described as a solution without a problem
To be fair, the LASER was a relatively small modification to the MASER. Both work on the same principle, the LASER just produces a slightly different range of EM. The original paper describing a LASER called it an Optical MASER. The really clever part was inventing the MASER, the LASER was an incremental improvement. The basic premise has been used with a lot of non-microwave, non-visible, EM too. At the time, a MASER that produced optical light was not seen as especially useful, while ones that produc
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To be fair, the LASER was a relatively small modification to the MASER. Both work on the same principle, the LASER just produces a slightly different range of EM. The original paper describing a LASER called it an Optical MASER. The really clever part was inventing the MASER, the LASER was an incremental improvement. The basic premise has been used with a lot of non-microwave, non-visible, EM too. At the time, a MASER that produced optical light was not seen as especially useful, while ones that produce microwaves were (and still are) useful for line-of-sight communication over long distances.
Don't forget Einstein, Fabrikant, Prokhorov and Basov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#History [wikipedia.org]. Every invention has many parents, even if the person who took the last step gets all the credit.
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The first article I read about the laser was in National Geographic, in 1966 or 67.
I don't remember this "solution without a problem" thing, if I remember right, that article was full of the promises of wonderful applications for the laser.
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You can buy laser pointers for a buck or two at a lot of 'dollar' stores, now.
It escapes me how they make money on the things, considering that batteries for them are usually 2-3 bucks retail, but wth, the cats love'em ;-) I have a couple dozen of the danged things in a box on a shelf in the closet, with shapes ranging from bullets to dicks to lipstick containers. Ah, the wonders of modern overseas manufacturing.
SB
I guess that worked out... (Score:1)
"a solution looking for a problem."
Found some.
On stage... (Score:2)
Pix: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cassiel-com/sets/72157622557842760/ [flickr.com]
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Any movies of the show available?
Some stuff my friends have been building.
http://www.robob.nl/node/35 [robob.nl]
DMX and/or beat-controlled.
Also: reading email in Ableton; nifty!
Unsurprising (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of things that seem like interesting but irrelevant phenomena at the outset turn out to be tremendously important later; that's why pure science is so important, yet so hard to justify to short-sighted "results-oriented" people like your average congresscritter. Whether it's the integrated circuit or, for that matter, electricity itself, fundamental discoveries and inventions tend to precede their applications, often by decades. Later, when someone attempts to solve a particular practical problem, some previously unused discovery is picked up and used as part of the solution, and only then does its significance become apparent.
It's a safe bet that fifty years from now, someone with a ten-digit Slashdot user ID will post a story about how clueless we were in 2010 about the earth-shattering importance of something few of us have heard of today except as a scientific curiosity. (And, no doubt, some of us who are still alive then will post thoughtful replies about obsolete technologies that will be immediately tagged "getoffmylawn" by younger folks.)
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Except in 50 years, they'll need a new phrase because the concept of a "lawn" will be as unfamiliar as say, rewinding cassette tapes, is today...
"You kids get off my minefield and out of my clear-fire zone!"
Re:Unsurprising (Score:4, Insightful)
We still say "don't touch that dial", "turn down the volume", "dial the phone". Hell, we even say "rewind" when we mean we're seeking backwards in a DVD.
In 50 years I look forward to being a grump saying "get off my lawn" when I really mean "get off that 2x2 slab of concrete I use for my barbeque."
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In 50 years, they'll still be bitching about not having flying cars.
And the geezers will be yelling at kids to stay off their 4chan.
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Sorry, just one more science fiction joke (Score:1)
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2012: 50 year birthday for the visible-spectrum LED, without which no advanced machines could be build!
And without those making the serious computers, with a wall of blinking lights, would be so much harder...
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Don't forget 2013, the 20 year anniversary of the modern high-brightness blue/white LED, without which no modern electronic gadget could have existed.
From invention to everywhere... (Score:2)
The discovery is 50 years old, and my parents laser printer is nearly 20 years old. The CD player is almost 30 years old. That's very fast from discovery to use to trickle down to consumer crap we can all buy. Sadly it took too long to turn the technology into a cat toy...
Sheldon
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50 years to bring it down to the $1 laser pointer from the dollar store.
Meow! (Score:2)
It's really amazing ... (Score:2)
And yet my geared bicycle requires nothing shy of a virgin, a volcano and some extraordinary good luck to get the rear derailleur aligned so it shifts clean and taught. Bicycle gears, in their current form, have been around since the 1950s [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_gearing#History], and yet the shifting technology hasn't
Maiman, lasers, and UFO's (Score:2)
No posts on Intel LightPeak? (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightpeak [wikipedia.org]
If Intel get this right, and the licensing costs aren't ridiculous we might finally get that 'be all and end all' cable for the PC we wanted for all those years.
I went on a lightpeak google frenzy yesterday, Intel wanted to get it out for the 50'th birthday of the lazer actually.
consumer lasers (Score:2)