Cynicism on the frontier

Excerpt from “How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist”:

We were still working under a Joint Service contract, managed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. […] One day, after we had been at it for about two years, Rabi and Kusch, the former and current chairmen of the department–both of them Nobel laureates for their work with atomic and molecular beams, and both with a lot of weight behind their opinions– came into my office and sat down. They were worried. Their research depended on support from the same source as did mine. “Look,” they said, “you should stop the work you are doing. It isn’t going to work. You know it’s not going to work. We know it’s not going to work. You’re wasting money. Just stop!”

The problem was that I was still an outsider to the field of molecular beams, as they saw it. It was their field and they did not think I fully appreciated the pertinent physics. […] Yet I had gone over the numbers very carefully with Gordon and Zeiger. I knew that the chances for quick success were somewhat marginal, but that the physics undergirding the concept was sound and the numbers promising.

–Charles H. Townes: Nobel laureate. He passed away on January 27 of this year.