One evening in December 1953, my fellow grad student Hobart Ellis and
I obtained a faint emission spectrum. There was the sought-after narrow
resonance line of the ammonia spectrum and its never-before-seen nearby
hyperfine satellites.
Making it happen
It took almost all of 1953 to finish putting the experiment
together. Toward the end of that year, several interesting things
happened. One was that Profs. Kusch and Rabi, then the
physics department head and elder statesman, respectively
(and experts in molecular beam studies), came into Townes’s
office to dissuade him from pursuing the experiment. They
said something along the lines of: “We all know it won’t
work. Why don’t you just stop?” The other interesting thing
was that we got the first indications that it actually would
work—at least well enough to give me a thesis.
Nay-saying from authority figures such as Rabi and Kusch
is common, in physics and elsewhere, and that hasn’t changed
much over the years. The farther out of the mainstream a
proposal is, the more often it is resisted by the powers-that-
be. This is understandable; after all, most such proposals do
not work. Look at Einstein: He got his Nobel Prize for the
photoelectric effect, but surely his greatest achievement was the
theory of relativity—which was too far out of the mainstream
for recognition. When Zeiger left for Lincoln Lab, Kusch
upbraided him for wasting his two-year post-doc on this
“harebrained scheme.”
Llewelyn Thomas was a theoretical physicist at Columbia.
He insisted to Townes that the maser could not emit a pure
frequency based on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. After
the first maser had shown oscillation (significant power output
with no input signal), Michael Danos, a young physicist in the
department, bet me a bottle of bourbon that it would not give
a pure frequency. I found out later that he had also bet Townes
a bottle of scotch. He paid up on both wagers.
Even after the second maser had been constructed and
we had observed an audio frequency beat note between the
relatively pure frequencies of the two masers oscillators, other
scientists objected. Bohr commented to Townes that what
we had done was not possible. As Townes relates, at a meeting with Von Neumann at a cocktail party in Princeton, Von
Neumann’s first reaction was skeptical.
One evening in December 1953, my fellow grad student
Hobart Ellis and I obtained a faint emission spectrum, as
shown in the top figure on the right. There was the sought-after narrow resonance line of the ammonia spectrum and its
never-before-seen nearby hyperfine satellites.
Looking for an even better result, I moved the cavity reso-
nator around and varied the voltage on the focuser. There was
no evidence of a distinct optimum, or anything close to oscil-
lation. It became clear that, while the focuser was separating
out the upper state molecules, it was not doing any appreciable
focusing of those molecules back into the annular ring shape
of the source.
James Gordon
The spectrum shows the sought-after resonance line of
the ammonia spectrum and its never-before-seen nearby
hyperfine satellites.
James Gordon
