ITHACA, N.Y. -- Nobel laureate Charles Townes, inventor of the laser and in recent years an astronomical explorer using an array of moveable infrared telescopes, will present the Thomas Gold lectures in Schwartz Auditorium in Rockefeller Hall at Cornell University next week.

Townes, who is University Professor of Physics emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley, will present his first lecture, "Characteristics of old stars measured by infrared interferometry" -- aimed at a specialized audience -- on Monday, March 29. His second lecture, "Logic and uncertainties in science and religion" -- for a more general audience -- is on Wednesday, March 31. Both lectures start at 4:30 p.m. and are free and open to the public.

Townes designed radar bombing systems during World War II while a member of the technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories. After the war he turned to microwave spectroscopy, which he predicted would be a powerful new tool for the study of the structure of atoms and molecules. He continued his research into microwave physics at Columbia University, where he was appointed to the faculty in 1948. In 1954 he achieved the first amplification of electromagnetic waves by stimulated emission using a device he named the "maser."

Collaborating with his brother-in-law, Arthur Schawlow, Townes then produced a theory of operating masers in the optical and infrared. Their collaboration produced a seminal paper on optical and infrared masers, for which they coined the acronym "laser," for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

In 1960 Townes and Schawlow received a patent for the invention of the laser. The first working laser was built by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Aircraft Company using ruby as the amplifying medium, operating at a wavelength of 0.69 microns.

Townes shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Aleksandr Prokhorov and Nicolay Basov of the Lebedev Institute in Moscow "for fundamental work in quantum electronics which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle." After moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was provost and professor of physics, Townes began exploiting the power of the laser by studying the nonlinear behavior of material interacting with very strong beams of radiation -- called nonlinear optics. His curiosity soon led him into yet other research areas, and by the early 1970s he was actively engaged in astrophysics research at the University of California-Berkeley, developing radio and infrared techniques for studying atoms and molecules in a variety of environments in the Milky Way and other galaxies.

In 1988 Townes began using an array of moveable telescopes for obtaining very high angular resolution of astronomical objects at infrared wavelengths employing a technique called spatial interferometry.

His work has involved many people in astronomy, physics and engineering, including researchers at Cornell. At UC-Berkeley he was thesis adviser to Paul Goldsmith, now the J.A. Weeks Professor in the Physical Sciences at Cornell and an organizer of the Gold lectures. In addition, Gordon Stacey, professor of astronomy at Cornell, was a postdoctoral research associate in the Townes group at UC-Berkeley. Researcher Thomas Nikola, currently working with Stacey, also collaborated with Townes on projects using the Kuiper Airborne Observatory.

The Thomas Gold Lecture Series is sponsored by Cornell's astronomy department and the College of Arts and Sciences in honor of Gold, professor emeritus of astronomy. The series brings a noted astronomer to Cornell each year for a research colloquium, a public lecture and meetings with faculty and students.