Charles H. Townes Quotes
The development of science is basically a social phenomenon, dependent on hard work and mutual support of many scientists and on the societies in which they live.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
Although not a scientist, Blackstone observed the advantage of an incubator, science center or other socially and intellectually interactive structure and realized that the cliché of a scientist alone in his laboratory was not the optimum environment in which science would flourish.
In the Dark and Middle Ages, it was the Muslim scientists who were the most advanced and they also preserved and improved upon Western science and other knowledge when Christianity was so intolerant that science was made virtually impossible to carry out. Then the Islamic world started closing and became more intolerant of new thought and the Christian West began loosening up. Serageldin does not feel humiliated at the current weak scientific status of Islam and urges reform to again have Islam involved in world class science. Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among educated Muslims but their views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists.
Charles Hard Townes was an American physicist. Townes worked on the theory and application of the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated with both maser and laser devices. He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov. Townes was an adviser to the United States Government, meeting every US President from Harry Truman (1945) to Bill Clinton (1999).
