Remembering the laser

摘要

Some publicity surrounding the 50th anniversary.of the invention of the laser caused me to think back to the first time I saw one in action. Memory said that it was in 1964 when I was a postdoc at the Ottawa laboratories of the Canadian National Research Council (NRC), overlooking the Ottawa River. I was in the Division of Pure Chemistry, but also in that building was the Division of Pure Physics, where one of the postdocs was Fokke Creutzberg, whom I knew from the University of Melbourne, where he had been a year ahead of me.