Annie Jacobsen

Okay, that's interesting.

I said, who said what?

And he said, this is when Townes was having trouble making it work.

And he said that Einstein said, keep trying.

And von Neumann said, it'll never work.

And I said, what do you make of that?

And he said, well, Einstein was very generous of spirit.

And he was always encouraging other scientists to think big and try.

And von Neumann was the kind of scientist who believed if he didn't come up with it, it probably wasn't a good idea.

But I love that because who else in the world has those two people that they run ideas by?

Fascinating.

Who you run ideas by, who I run ideas by, who Charles Townes.

But here's another interesting thought about the laser is Charles Townes, and he didn't share this fact for decades.

But later in life, he wrote a lengthy article, I believe it was for the Harvard Alumni Magazine, that the idea for the laser came to him when he was sitting on a park bench from above.

It was a religious experience for him.

Like he'd been working on this problem.

He'd been working on this science problem, according to Charles Townes.

And by the way, he was inspired, he told me, to develop the laser from the time he was a little kid in the 20s reading the Soviet science fiction novel, The Garin Death Ray.

So it's like it was a science fiction concept, a laser.

He's a little kid, Charles Townes, thinking about this, thinking about this, then all through his life continuing to think about it, then running it by his Einstein colleagues.