3 2350 10838 1840 86 95
Summary: Well, a turn for the worse. Hopefully an anomaly. Texas...Mississippi...no masks...why?
Well, this is March 4, and how's the Second Coming of Donald Trump progressing? Where are those QAnon terrorists? Why is the U.S. Capitol not being overrun again? Why is the House of Representations so afraid about a second onslaught that it cancelled sessions for the rest of the week?
POLITICS! Democrats just want to take advantage of this moment to better reinforce the minds of voters of how terrible Republicans are, Trump in particular. The House is on danger leave only to underscore those brave Democrats in the Senate who are going to work under these stressful circumstances to insure that voters better appreciate them for passing the COVID-19 relief package to minimize evictions, hunger and contraction of this deadly virus.
About the topic of today, LASER is the acronym for the
light
amplification by
stimulated
emission of
radiation. The theory was developed by Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow, and the first maser
(the m being for microwave) was built by Theodore Maiman in 1960. Townes was mostly at MIT and Schawlow at Bell Labs when they began their research in this field. They both became Nobel laureates. Schawlow joined Stanford when I was a junior there, and Townes went to Cal-Berkeley in 1967.
My life entered Townes' when I spent some time on a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (
SETI) project for the NASA Ames Research Center, where the concept of laser light played a key role in linking me with his ideas. Interestingly enough, as you will learn, my wife was a key factor in all of this.
So let me digress a bit, for I've entered the disposal stage of my life. I am throwing away a lot of apartment clutter, starting with photo accoutrements and slides, of which I must have around 5000. I'm sorting out which ones to digitize, and in my first batch to see if this actually worked, found some which I haven't seen in half a century, and didn't know they even existed.
To begin, just to underscore Pearl's involvement, I'll start by showing these just discovered photos in chronological stages. The first one in 1963 soon after we were married when we were in Kilauea, Kauai, and our backyard was where South Pacific was filmed. The second was a few years later at her family home in Hilo:
Then the third, just about exactly half a century ago, sitting in my biochemical laboratory at LSU:
She was the inspiration for my torturous path towards a PhD dissertation, which was indeed a rocky road. The results were published in a 1975 issue of
Applied Microbiology entitled:
One day in 1969 she was reading a laser article in LIFE magazine and said, why don't you use a laser in your research? Sorry I heard that, for I subequently suffered through three years of frustrating agony. To begin, I came up with an idea to use a laser to sterilize microbiological processes. I first had to build a tunable laser, for in those early days, you couldn't purchase one, This product was too new. But how to get the funds to do it yourself? With my major professor, Barry Greenberg, we found a company, Milk Protein, which was interested in finding a better way to pasteurize milk. They funded the hardware effort.
I bought the equipment and couldn't get the system to lase. I was about to give up when I learned that two of my nephews had drowned in Utah. So I went to their funeral. On the flight back, looking out the window, a second inspiration just appeared in my mind, the clue on how to adjust the diffraction grating. Went back to my lab, and this vision worked!
That was just stage one. The only wavelengths I could get were in the visible range
The science in those days was limited to visible wavelengths, and I needed to get down to 265 nanometers for optimal dissociation of the DNA bond in
E. coli. Frequency doubling, or using monochromatic light at 530 nm to convert down to 265 nm was theoretically possible. However, the available technology was only 0.01% efficient, which made the beam too weak to do anything.
The only solution was an exogenous photosensitizer (a dye) to transfer the energy to the bond. Rhodamine 6G produced a range of 556-610 nm light, while Coumarin gave 441-475 nm You would have thought that the Coumarin would have had a higher sterilization efficiency, being closer to the desired 265 nm wavelength. The results were startling. The R6G did induce killing of E. coli. However, the Coumarin catalyzed growth.
We could never figure out why, but actually discovered a technique to
enhance the growth of desirable bacteria using a laser attuned to a certain wavelength. I wonder why no one or company has taken advantage of this potential for industrial products?
Anyone seeking a way to a fortune, look into this.
I did get my PhD in biochemical engineering, but I later realized that what I did was patently foolish. Most doctoral students pick a topic where a professor already has funds to focus on a topic approved by a Federal agency. In addition, the notion of finding your own funds to do research, then entering a field which had no precedent, was simply idiotic. The younger person in my laboratory who was supposed to continue my work ended up developing a mathematical model, I think. Never had to build or irradiate anything. This is the smarter model in getting a PhD. Only when you get into the real world do you need to actually do something tangible.
I should mention that Harry Toups was this individual, who today is running the laboratories in the LSU Chemical Engineering Department. He and Margaret still communicate with me. Maybe they can be convinced to join the around the world journey. I also found a few slides of our days then, so someday I'll add photo here of us in those days.
So anyway, this laser experience a couple of years later led to me to work with Nobel Laureate Charles Townes (
I drove from the Stanford campus to Berkeley for our encounters, actually spending most of my time golfing at Palo Alto Muni, watching the Summer Olympics on TV and taking a wine-tasting course) on a proposal to detect extrasolar planets on his contention that all planets with atmospheres absorb starlight, then, depending on conditions, show promise for stimulated emission at monochromatic wavelengths that would also define the gas itself. Thus, even though the starlight is ten million times brighter, this light occupies the entire spectrum, while the reflected atmospheric lumens for a well defined monochromatic wavelength we determined should be trackable. We would be able to see an exoplanet circle a planet outside our solar system. You can read about what we were trying to do in this posting of six years ago entitled:
It was probably not a good idea to call this system the Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer (or PAT for short). But it probably did not make much difference for future funding because NASA had earlier made a determination that in searching for anything in outer space, they would use the microwave portion of the spectrum because signals are less diminished over long distances compared to visible light. I closed that posting with:
In the meantime, my attitude has shifted, so I'm not advocating even bothering with PAT. In 1976, yes, let's go confirm a planet outside our solar system. Now? Why bother to find any more, as we have found a thousand, (That was 8 years ago. As of 28January2021, there were 4,341 confirmed and another 5,000 or so being analyzed) and astronomers have already said that there could be more than 100 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy that could be home to life. Further, there could be 500 billion other galaxies in our Universe. Let's instead expand our efforts to detect possible signals from aliens. On with SETI! Bring back Jodie Foster, sometimes known as Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute. If you clicked on the Jodie Foster link, and want to hear more, go HERE. Should you be as enamored of the notion of FIRST CONTACT, this video gives you the top ten films on this subject. Contact is only #5. What was #1? Go ahead, take a look.
Then the following year I found myself at the Lawrence Livermore Livermore National Laboratory to work on laser fusion. Fusion is the process our sun and all the stars use, with hydrogen as the fuel, to produce energy. Man-made fusion utilizes isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, because we are not able to meet the conditions existing at the core of the sun. Alas, I thought, after a couple of summers there, that the technology was at least 30 years away from commercialization. Recently, meaning 43 years later, fusion is still 30 years away, and that is being optimistic.
But taking everything into consideration, I thought, maybe there might be something to hydrogen, for it is the first element (one would think a divine clue), is most (73%) of the Universe, and if combined with oxygen, you get energy and water. Surely, there is a message here.
Further, Hawaii's economy depended on air transport, and hydrogen, being the lightest jetfuel (or maybe even for a fast-moving dirigible, like Brutoco's Clipper), would be ideal for future jets. Read my HuffPo of a decade ago.
Fortuitously, in 1979 I was asked to work for Senator Spark Matsunaga and drafted the first hydrogen bill that became law. Later on, the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, which I directed, became one of the Department of Energy's national hydrogen research and training centers, plus I chaired the Secretary of Energy's Hydrogen Technical Advisory Panel, which produced The Green Hydrogen Economy, setting the budget level for the next five years. Incredibly enough, Congress exactly followed our recommendations to the point where in one year the hydrogen budget was higher than solar technology. It then later occurred to me that one way to accelerate the hydrogen economy was to make this fuel free. Some of my ideas are outlandish, but on analysis, actually make sense.
While SETI, World Peace, the Hydrogen Economy, Fusion and the Blue Revolution will probably not be actualized in my lifetime, I do take some pride in the initiation of a variety of potentially promising pathways for Humanity. Most I believe will attain reality, but it might take a century, or more. I hope the first floating city from the Blue Revolution, for one, will host the 2050 World Expo.
I've long wondered where I'd be if Pearl did not mention lasers to me, or I never met her. Maybe I'd be richer or famous or homeless. One's life can change with just any fateful decision. Even today.
-
