Arthur Leonard Schawlow (May 5, 1921 – April 28, 1999) was an American physicist. He is
best remembered for his work on lasers, for which he was awarded a 1981 Nobel Prize.
Biography
His mother, Helen Mason, was from Canada and his father, Arthur Schawlow, was an
immigrant from Latvia. When Arthur was three years old, they
moved to Toronto, Canada.
At the age of 16 he completed high school and received a scholarship in science at the
University of Toronto. After earning his undergraduate degree Schawlow continued in graduate school
at the University of Toronto which was interrupted due to World War II. At the end of the
war he began work on his Ph.D at U of T with Professor Malcolm Crawford. He then took a postdoctoral position with
Charles Townes at the physics department of Columbia University in the fall of 1949.
In 1951 he married Aurelia Townes, younger sister to Charles Townes, and together they had three
children; Arthur Jr., Helen, and Edith. Arthur Jr. was autistic, with very little speech
ability.
He went on to accepted a position at Bell Labs in late 1951.
He left in 1961 to join the faculty at Stanford
University as a professor. He remained until he retired to emeritus status in 1996.
Schawlow and Professor Robert Hofstadter at Stanford, who also had an autistic
child, teamed up to help each other find solutions to the condition. Arthur Jr. was put in a special center for autistic
individuals, and later Schawlow put together an institution to care for people with autism in Paradise, California. It was later named the Arthur Schawlow Center
in 1999, shortly before his death.
Schawlow was a promoter of the controversial theory of facilitated
communication with patients of autism. [1][2]
Although his research focused on optics, in particular, lasers
and their use in spectroscopy, he also pursued investigations in the areas of
superconductivity and nuclear
resonance. Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in
Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai
Siegbahn for their contributions to the development of laser spectroscopy.
Schawlow coauthored Microwave Spectroscopy (1955) with Charles Townes. Also with Townes,
they prepared a much disputed, by Gordon Gould, laser
patent filed by Bell Labs in 1958.
In 1991 the NEC Corporation and the American Physical Society established a prize: the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science. The prize is awarded annually to
"candidates who have made outstanding contributions to basic research using lasers."
Schawlow was born in Mount Vernon, New York and died of leukemia in Palo Alto, California.
Awards
External links
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