This is the University of Rochester.
The year 2010 is the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser.
And that means the laser was really made to work
for the first time in 1960.
And it's interesting to get a sense of what was going on at that time.
There were a number of people trying to make lasers work,
they had this idea that you could produce this light source
that was based on some of the discoveries from radar from the decades before.
And several labs around the country were trying to make lasers work,
and one particular group reported one of the first results.
It was really one of these discoveries that people
didn't really appreciate at the time. In fact,
one of the first things said about lasers was, they're a solution looking for a problem.
If you look at where some of the most exciting science is happening,
it's happening when -
when lasers take technology and take science to an extreme.
And it's really interesting, because there are many extremes --
frontiers -- the laser is at.
A local frontier is the frontiers of temperature.
In this lab, we cool atoms down. Small clouds of atoms -
maybe a million or a billion atoms - down to
millionths or billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
That's colder than any natural place in the universe.
And what we do is we try to understand the very simple things,
like how two atoms come together and turn into a molecule.
Or how when matter becomes so cold,
do the quantum mechanical properties that could be used for
understanding the fundamental nature of physics,
but also future schemes and communication and computation,
how things work at that limit. Not far from here, two miles
is a laboratory that produces some of the highest temperatures known to man and known to science,
also using lasers. That's the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.
A tiny little pellet is irradiated with laser light from almost all directions,
creating a shock wave that squeezes the pellet so hard
that it reaches mega-kelvins and some of the highest temperatures.
So there are moments here in Rochester where we probably have
two of the largest temperature extremes anywhere on the planet.
So right now the frontier of lasers is at these limits where
size, or time, or temperature or pressure
are being pushed to their limits because of lasers.
And somebody asked me recently,
what's so special about the laser? Why has it such an important thing,
and why do people, including myself, think that it's the gift that will keep on giving?
It will be at the heart of future discoveries for decades to come.
And that's a tough question. But if you ask
how does nature work? At least the piece of nature that we live in?
The laser light, it's a special form of light,
and light is arguably the most important single quantity in our world,
as humans. It's the reason why we have eyes.
It's the reason we have oxygen on this planet.
It's the reason that we have food that we can eat.
It is in fact the ultimate interactions that are involved in life,
electricity and magnetism, that gives rise
to the fact that we have different kinds of atoms,
that gives rise to the fact that matter looks the way that it does.
So when you begin to think about it as a physicist,
what it is that actually makes our universe the place it is.
What gives it its structure, shape, what allows us to be here.
It really traces back more than any other interaction
to the existence of life.
So when you invent something like a laser,
where in a laser all the light is moving
in a phase-lock way like waves moving on an ocean,
you've got a pure form of light that's one of the most
important probes and interactions that you can have.
So once you harness that, it's really not surprising
that almost every field of human endeavor in technology is touched by it.
And, I think will be for another 20 years to come.
This is the University of Rochester.