Nobel Prize

I was born on 22 March 1931 in New York, the elder child of Abraham and Fanny Richter. In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me. The most influential teachers in my undergraduate years…

Apart from several monographs on physics and astrophysics, I have published two books which are collections of various articles of scientific, semi-scientific and general, social and political character. Some of these articles contain rather much biographical material. So I do not have any wish to come back to my autobiography. However, it is the wish…

Murray Gell-Mann was born on 15th September 1929, in New York City. He obtained his B.Sc. at Yale University in 1948, and his Ph.D. in 1951 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1952 he became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, during 1952-1953 he was instructor at the University of Chicago, from…

I was born in Heidelberg, Germany, on October 30, 1941. My parents had moved there from their native Breslau a few years earlier. As far as I can tell, I am the only academic in our family. My father Karl Hänsch was a businessman engaged in the export of farming machinery, while my mother Marta…

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I was born the youngest of three children, on a cattle ranch in Cherry County, Nebraska, not far from the South Dakota border, on March 10, 1923. This is a very sparsely populated part of the United States and remote from any center of population. It seems incredible by modern standards that by the age…

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Charles Hard Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on July 28, 1915, the son of Henry Keith Townes, an attorney, and Ellen (Hard) Townes. He attended the Greenville public schools and then Furman University in Greenville, where he completed the requirements for the Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and the Bachelor of Arts…

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Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1964 Production of Coherent Radiation by Atoms and Molecules Pdf 956 kB