The Optical Society Oral History Project Interview with ... - OSA

Interview with Dr. Anthony Siegman, May 5, 2008 12
might've been in my genes because since my father was an accountant and a controller.
And I wasn't disappointed or anything else. I didn't have any great reaction to this. But I
think where it may have been a valid assessment, is that I have always gotten satisfaction
from collecting ideas and analyses and scientific principles in whatever it is I'm working
on, and reading a lot of papers and collecting references, and trying to bring those all
together into a unified, clear presentation—put everything in a common notation and so
on. We'll get back to this, I think, in a short while.
So as a new faculty member, I started writing class notes and a book on microwave
masers. And I guess it would have been the early 1960s, a year or two after the laser was
invented that that book came out with McGraw-Hill. In retrospect, it was an excellent
book. It was very well done. The only problem was that the microwave maser, the solidstate
maser, was being totally replaced by other things. Nonetheless, it got translated into
Russian and Polish and got good reviews. But it just totally lost its market about the time
it came out. So now it's 1957, and then 1958. 1958 is a landmark year—and Townes and
Schawlow write this famous Phys. Rev. paper on of how to make a laser. And as Jeff
Hecht said in the tribute yesterday, they give an excellent physical analysis of what's
needed to make a laser, and they try to suggest one or two ways that you might do it,
none of which actually really ever turn out to be successful, or at least important. But
their stature in the field, and their writing this Phys. Rev. paper gets a lot more people
interested in how can we go from masers to lasers. And I really was not one of those, to
be honest. I didn't have the imagination— the drive toward looking for broader things
that, for instance, Ted Maiman obviously had.