The audience began to laugh at the unintended joke, because sitting right in front of Tegmark was Charles Townes, inventor of the laser. Yes, we all thought, thanks to Townes, there is a laser, billions of them. They’re so common we lose them like pencils, so small they are buried in tiny devices, so powerful they reflect off the moon. They are the miracle light of today’s technological revolution and the precision instrument of our latest science.

We came to Berkeley to honor Charles Townes on his 90th birthday in a gala celebration called “Amazing Light: Visions for Discovery.” When the planners asked the legendary Nobel laureate how the conference should start, he suggested that we begin with “the great unknowns of physics.” Even after a lifetime of achievements, Townes is more interested in tomorrow’s discoveries than yesterday’s results. A fitting outlook, of course, for the only winner of a Nobel prize in science and the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, which he won in 2005. For Townes, science and religion are never-ending frontiers of human imagination, where diligence and illumination bring us to new visions, cosmic and human.

Also at Townes’ suggestion, the gala honored the work of outstanding young scientists in cosmology, quantum physics and technical innovation. In the front row with his hand up first was none other than Townes, with all the excitement of a young scientist himself, nudging these eager researchers with probing questions.

“The most important product of knowledge is ignorance,” according to David Gross, the 2004 Nobel laureate who started the conference with a talk entitled “Major Unknowns in Fundamental Physics.” Rather than start by celebrating the achievement of the laser or with the fact that the laser has been key to 24 Nobel prizes in physics, we started with what is not known. As Gross put it, each answered question raises twenty unanswered questions. A good thing, too, because unanswered questions are the laboratories for tomorrow’s scientists.

After a quick search of the podium, Tegmark found his laser and with its piercing light pointed our attention to some unresolved questions of cosmology. Is the universe everywhere the same or are there different regions, so different that they should be thought of as different universes within a larger multiverse?

The questions, provocative and humbling, kept coming. What happened at the big bang? What is this strange stuff called dark matter, whose gravity we can detect but which emits no light and is shrouded in uncertainty? Even more mysterious is dark energy. It makes up seventy percent of the energy of the universe, but we can’t get at it except as a way to explain why the universe is not only expanding but accelerating in its expansion. Dark energy, whatever it is, seems to offset the effect of gravity itself as the universe expands more rapidly. Together, dark matter and dark energy are thought to make up the far greater portion of the universe.

On the grand scale, the cosmos is hidden, almost mysterious. On the tiniest scale, the matter that makes up the cosmos is counter-intuitive. Cosmology is enigmatic while quantum physics is…well, pretty weird. “Quantum weirdness,” in fact, is now the accepted term. It refers not to inadequacies in quantum theory but to the problems we face in making sense of it at the level of everyday experiences.

Consider what’s called “quantum entanglement.” According to physics, even though two objects are separated and unable to have a causal effect on each other, the quantum state of each of the objects must be described with reference to the other. It is as if the state of the two objects is entangled or connected by some causal bond unlimited by the speed of light. At the everyday level, this is nuts. Imagine having two tennis balls and giving one to a friend who takes it to China. Spin yours and instantly (literally, that is, without time for any message) his is also spinning, not in just any way, but precisely opposite of yours.

We should not expect the weirdness to go away soon. “If there’s going to be change, it will only get weirder,” according to Gross.

But weird can be good, we learned, at least if we figure out how to “put weirdness to work.” That was the challenge offered by Nobel laureate William Phillips, who shared the 1997 prize for using lasers to cool and trap neutral atoms. When cooled to near absolute zero, these atoms are effectively trapped, so they can be studied and their surprising new properties can be exploited in novel technologies. Phillips was referring, of course, to quantum computing, which might someday put quantum weirdness to work on our desktops.

Phillips’ own work is critical to opening up new pathways and leading directly to the creation of the Bose-Einstein condensate, a new state of matter. Here as much as anywhere, we saw how Charles Townes’ work on the laser was not only visionary physics but opened the way to a whole new era of discovery. Not just supermarket checkouts and CD players, not just laser surgery or laser printers or laser light shows, but the very heart of scientific discovery is advanced by Townes’ unique form of light.

Michio Kaku, one of the speakers and the co-founder of string theory, went so far as to rank the laser as one of the top ten discoveries of all time, not far below fire, agriculture, or the wheel. When Townes began his work on the laser, however, some colleagues in physics thought it would never work or that if it did, it was a “solution in search of a problem.”

But Townes persisted, not sure what might come of his work but drawn by the challenge. Early one morning in 1951 while he was sitting on a park bench, inspiration came to him, almost as a vision. As he tells the story in his 1999 book, How the Laser Happened, diligence and illumination converged in a moment of self-transcendence. In the space of a few minutes, the essential ideas of the maser, the predecessor of the laser, came to him in calculations on the back of an envelope.

Fiat lux is the motto of the University of California at Berkeley, where we met. The phrase is Latin for “Let there be light,” the words from Genesis signifying creativity and illumination. Whether scratched on ancient parchment or on the back of an envelope, the power of creativity breaks through in dazzling light, glorious and inspiring.

The gala ended with a banquet, complete with tributes from Nobel prize winners and, of course, a laser light show. Townes’ family surrounded him, and we were reminded that while the laser may be the light of Charles’ work, Frances, his wife since 1941, is the light of his life.

A blessing over the event was offered by Robert Russell, a minister and a close friend of Charles and Frances:

We pray in gratitude for the adventure of science, for the astonishing vistas it brings us of the beauty of the universe from quark to quasar, from chromosome to the cosmos. We are especially thankful tonight for the life of discovery and service of Charles Townes. May the maser and laser be used for the good of this world and for the building of a better global future. Most of all we are thankful for Charles especially on this his ninetieth birthday, for the many whose lives he has touched and ennobled, and we pray for him many more years of health, joy and rewarding research. We pray all these things in your Name O Holy One of many Names.

Links of Interest
For more information and a list of winners of the Young Scholars Competition, please go to: www.foundationalquestions.net/townes

Ronald Cole-Turner, M.Div., Ph.D., is H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and a member of the John Templeton Foundation Board of Advisors.

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