Charles Townes on choosing between working for defense and continuing work on lasers.

Townes:

I was vice president and director of research at the Institute for Defense Analysis. T he president was more or less a businessman, so I had the primary technical responsibility and the whole job was mostly technical. He was even more of a contact man with politicians and government officials. Most of the running of IDA really fell on me. I also hated to drop out of the laser work, but I felt it was just terribly important for some scientists to go to Washington so I did it. As a matter of fact, I remember Walter Brattain was urging me, "Oh, don’t do that, you must build a laser," that’s the most important thing, to build a laser, because it was of Nobel prize importance. Both he and I knew one or two people that had already nominated me for a Nobel Prize, and he kept saying, "That’s the thing you must do." I felt the laser was really in the bag. It obviously could be built and it just wasn’t critical for me in particular to build one. I would have liked to build one, first, but I felt there were more important things to do and if the Nobel Committee didn’t understand that the critical work was really all done, it was just too bad. I had been nominated, I know, on the basis of the maser already, and wasn’t all that worried about it. The Nobel Prize does mean something to scientists, and so I thought about it seriously, but decided that I really ought to go to Washington. However, that was something of a shock to my students.