Scientists boast that radar has won the war, and the atomic bomb has ended the war. What will physicists create next? As the Cold War against the Soviet Union progressed, the US government invested more and more funds in basic and applied research. Companies and entrepreneurs not only detect military applications, but also civilian applications, and spend their money on piles. Industrial and university laboratories proliferated. The laser pointer grows from this fertile soil.
With the official release of Maiman's first laser engraver, the Hughes Research Laboratory issued its first public statement to the news media on July 7, 1960. This caused a great sensation. The front page newspapers discussed the possible death rays, but some people expressed doubts. Scientists, they have not been able to see a detailed and logical complete "Nature" paper. Another questionable fact is that Maiman has not reported seeing a bright beam, which is the expected characteristic of the laser. I personally asked a few people in the Hughes team if they had seen a bright beam of light. Surprisingly, they had not. Maiman's experiment was not carried out for a simple beam of light, but he analyzed the spectrum of the emitted light and found that the frequency range included was significantly reduced. This is exactly what Art Schawlow and my own theoretical paper on optical masers (or lasers) predicted, and it was confirmed in masers that generate longer wavelength microwave radiation. The evidence provided in Figure 2 of Maiman's Nature paper is a clear proof of laser action. Soon thereafter, both in the Maiman laboratory in Hughes or in the Schawlow laboratory in Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, the bright red spots on the laboratory walls of the ruby blue laser pointer beam were seen and appreciated.
In Planck’s most important work published in 1900, he inferred the relationship between energy and radiation frequency. Essentially, energy can only be emitted or absorbed in discrete blocks, which he called quantum, even if these The block is small. His theory marked a turning point in physics and inspired emerging physicists such as Albert Einstein. In 1905, Einstein published a paper on the photoelectric effect. The paper proposed that light also transfers energy in the form of blocks. In this case, discrete quantum particles are now called photons.