Wednesday January 28, 2015 01:07 PM

The Associated Press

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Charles Townes, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose discoveries in quantum electronics led to the laser technology used in fiber-optic communications, medicine and James Bond films, has died. He was 99.

He died on Tuesday on his way to the hospital, according to the website of the University of California at Berkeley, where Townes had worked for almost 50 years, most recently as professor emeritus.

Townes won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for his discovery of the maser -- a device that creates a concentrated beam of microwave radiation -- a decade earlier. Soviet physicists Nicolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov, who independently produced the same findings, shared the award. Townes later laid the theoretical foundations for the laser, originally put forth by Albert Einstein in 1917, based on the emission of light, instead of microwave radiation.

"He was one of the most important experimental physicists of the last century," Reinhard Genzel, a professor of physics at Berkeley, said of Townes, according to the article on the school's website. "His strength was his curiosity and his unshakable optimism, based on his deep Christian spirituality."

Citing a religious-like revelation, Townes said he was sitting on a park bench among blooming azaleas in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1951 when it dawned on him how to create a beam of short-wavelength, high-frequency molecules, according to a 2014 article marking his birthday.

Laser is an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." Theodore Maiman is credited with operating the first laser device on May 16, 1960, at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California. In the decades that followed, the technology was used for everything from atomic clocks, corrective eye surgery, supermarket bar-code scanners, CD-ROMs and DVDs, to industrial cutting instruments and light shows at rock concerts.

It even had a prominent role in James Bond movies. In the 1964 film "Goldfinger," the main villain threatened to kill British secret agent 007 with an industrial laser device. Bond also escaped deadly beams in "Die Another Day" (2002), and his laser watch helped him out of tight situations in "Never Say Never Again" (1983) and "GoldenEye" (1995).

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Charles Townes, 99; Nobel winner pioneered laser technology

BERKELEY

Charles Hard Townes, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser and subsequently pioneered the use of lasers in astronomy, died early Tuesday, Jan. 27. He was 99 and in failing health, and died on his way to the hospital.

Charles Townes embodies the best of Berkeley; hes a great teacher, great researcher and great public servant, said UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks on the occasion of a campuswide celebration of Townes 99th birthday last July 28. As we celebrate this 99-year milestone and a career spanning nearly 80 years, we can only be impressed by the range of his intellectual curiosity, his persistence and his pioneering spirit.

Until last year, Townes visited the campus daily, working either in his office in the physics department or at the Space Sciences Laboratory.

Charlie was a cornerstone of the Space Sciences Laboratory for almost 50 years, said Stuart Bale, director of the lab and a UC Berkeley professor of physics. He trained a great number of excellent students in experimental astrophysics and pioneered a program to develop interferometry at short wavelengths. He was a truly inspiring man and a nice guy. Well miss him.

Charlie Townes had an enormous impact on physics and society in general, said Steven Boggs, professor and chair of the UC Berkeley Department of Physics. Our department and all of UC Berkeley benefited from his wisdom and vision for nearly half a century. His overwhelming dedication to science and personal commitment to remaining active in research was inspirational to all of us. Berkeley physics has lost a true icon and our deepest sympathies go out to his wife, Frances, and the entire Townes family.

The passing away of Professor Charles Townes today marks the end of an era, said astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, a professor of physics at UC Berkeley and director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. He was one of the most important experimental physicists of the last century. To those who knew him as colleagues or students, he was a role model, a wonderful mentor and a deeply admired person. His strength was his curiosity and his unshakable optimism, based on his deep Christian spirituality.

Townes, a longtime member of the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, often emphasized the importance of faith in his life, and was honored with the 2005 Templeton Prize for contributions to affirming lifes spiritual dimension.

Revelation

Townes was 35 in the spring of 1951 when, seated on a park bench among blooming azaleas in Washington, D.C., he was struck by the solution to a longstanding problem, how to create a pure beam of short-wavelength, high-frequency light.

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Nobel laureate and laser inventor Charles Townes dies at 99

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Are Angels Real ?
there are many more videos like this on youtube.. can science really explain all this..

By: Scientific Spirituality

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Are Angels Real ? - Video

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aNzssRvbWc

Ram Setu - Evidence of Ramayana
Ramayana is not just mythology but was history.

By: Scientific Spirituality

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Ram Setu - Evidence of Ramayana - Video

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Namaste! Help us build a community center in Louisiana! (description below)
Please help us reach our goal and donate on Indiegogo: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/namaste-help-build-community-center-in-louisiana# We are building a center for harmony, peace and...

By: AWGP-Louisiana

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Namaste! Help us build a community center in Louisiana! (description below) - Video

I recently sat with a good friend as she received yet another round of chemo for reoccurring cancer. Our visit was a tender time of connecting and conversing about what really matters. My friend, a longtime spiritual seeker in the Catholic tradition, confessed that she doesn't really know for sure whether there is an afterlife. The notion that her body's molecules will melt into the "great-all" of the universe isn't so very attractive. This idea seems to be an extant theme in contemporary scientific-cosmological explanations about where we've come from and where we are going. From the perspective of pure biology, it seems quite correct.

But it doesn't go far enough for many people, including me.

Enter Dr. Eben Alexander's book Proof of Heaven. The author is a neurosurgeon who in 2008 fell victim to a rare form of bacterial meningitis that landed him in a weeklong coma. After many days of antibiotics failed to yield discernable improvement, Alexander's prospects for making a full recovery with all faculties intact were virtually nil. Yet he inexplicably recovered completely. His book chronicles a near-death experience that, according to prevailing scientific theories, never should have happened.

I have been fascinated by accounts of near-death experiences since graduate school, when my nursing studies focused on Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross' then-revolutionary work with death and dying and Dr. Raymond Moody's work Life after Life. Typically, people report being met and accompanied by deceased loved ones, floating above their bodies while medical personnel tried to revive them, and encountering an ineffable being of light who emanates unconditional love. Some report being offered a choice about whether to return to earthly life or not. Upon recovery, people said they experienced a heightened awareness that love is the most important thing in the world and they no longer feared death.

For the last 50 years, medical science has explained near-death experiences as the result of a gradual shutting down of the cells of the outer layers of the brain, the neocortex, that governs higher cognitive functions such as vision, hearing, memory, emotional responses, and abstract thinking. This is what Alexander himself believed when some of his patients shared stories of deceased loved ones who came to comfort them in their final days.

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Since bacterial meningitis attacks the connective tissue (or meninges), lining the neocortex, Alexander believes the severe intractability of his infection meant his neocortex was completely "offline," making any near-death experience theoretically impossible in his case. While some have criticized Alexander's science, no one disputes that he was all but dead, yet came back to tell about it.

His life was completely changed by the experience: "[It] healed my fragmented soul. It had let me know that I had always been loved, and it also showed me that absolutely everyone else in the universe is loved, too." Alexander now works to bridge the gap between materialist understandings of a soulless, somewhat mechanistic universe and new empirical discoveries in quantum mechanics and the domains of consciousness and spirituality.

His most recent book, The Map of Heaven, explores what science, religion and ancient wisdom from luminaries such as Plato, the Dalai Lama and Carl Jung have to offer.

At the heart of the debate is the nature of human consciousness. Scientific materialists believe human consciousness is the product of physical brain functions. When the brain dies, consciousness (and that which makes us quintessentially human) dies along with it. Other, "post-materialist scientists" believe this construct cannot be proven and ignores abundant empirical evidence to the contrary.

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Will science prove there is a heaven?

Sam Harris: 'The Tesla Model S is that rare thing a piece of technology that is both utterly desirable and good for the planet.' Photograph: David Levene

Sam Harris is an American neuroscientist, author and philosopher. His book The End of Faith (2004) appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for 33 weeks. This was followed by The Moral Landscape, published in 2010, Lying in 2011, and Free Will in 2012. Harris is co-founder and the CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values. He appears frequently on television and radio (including Real Time With Bill Maher, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) to talk about the conflict between religion and science. His latest book, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion (Bantam Press), is out on 29 January.

I love this podcast. Carlin is not a professional historian, but he could well be the most engaging history professor on Earth. His series on the first world war is simply a masterpiece made all the more impressive by the informal, meandering way he leads the listener from poignancy to horror and back again. We appear to be entering a new golden age of audio, and Carlin is doing some of the best work in this medium.

This electric car is that rare thing a piece of technology that is both utterly desirable and good for the planet. Elon Musk has built the nicest automobile in history and singlehandedly created a new market for electric cars. When you consider the environmental and geopolitical consequences of our remaining dependent on oil from rising sea levels to our funding both sides of the war on terror it is amazing to see a solution arising out of brilliant and sexy engineering.

My midlife crisis has taken the form of training in a variety of martial arts. By far the most addictive and conducive to injury (in my case) has been Brazilian jiujitsu. As I wrote in an article entitled The Pleasures of Drowning: The experience of grappling with an expert is akin to falling into deep water without knowing how to swim. You will make a furious effort to stay afloat and you will fail. Once you learn how to swim, however, it becomes difficult to see what the problem is why cant a drowning man just relax and tread water? The same inscrutable difference between lethal ignorance and lifesaving knowledge can be found on the mat: to train in BJJ is to continually drown or, rather, to be drowned, in sudden and ingenious ways and to be taught, again and again, how to swim.

Ive only recently begun to pay attention to the progress being made in artificial intelligence. The field is advancing faster than most people realise, and we seem to be headed for a precipice of sorts. Reading Bostroms book, you come away feeling that there may be no way to build machines that possess true general intelligence that is, the ability to learn new concepts and apply them in unfamiliar contexts without destroying ourselves in the process. You also get the sense that we will inevitably build such machines, unless we destroy ourselves some other way. So listen to Dan Carlins podcast while you still can!

I have no idea how famous Bill Burr and Jim Gaffigan (left) are outside the United States, but here they are emerging as two of the funniest voices in comedy. Each has one-hour specials available on Netflix. Burrs humour is very dark and edgy, while Gaffigan never says a cross word. Both are absolutely hilarious.

I had never heard of sculptor Adolfo Wildt before I stumbled upon a book of photographs representing his work. He seems to have specialised in creating extremely smooth marble sculptures depicting people in negative states of mind, from smugness to agony. Even his happy faces convey some form of menace. This is how I look when I discover that Ive run out of coffee, beer, or chocolate. It is also the expression I will be wearing when the machines take over.

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On my radar: Sam Harriss cultural highlights

"At the heart of everything is the need of an adequate formation so that, steadfast in ones own identity, we can grow in mutual knowledge." Vatican City, January 26, 2015 (Zenit.org) | 234 hits

Here is the translation of the Holy Father's address to members of the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Vatican on Saturday.

* * *

Dear Cardinals,

Dear Brother Bishops and Priests,

Brothers and sisters,

I receive you with pleasure at the conclusion of the conference organized to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the opening in Rome of the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic studies. I thank Cardinal Grocholewski for his words addressed in everyone's name, and Cardinal Tauran for his presence.

In the last few years, despite some misunderstandings and difficulties, steps forward in interreligious dialogue have been made, as well as with the faithful of Islam. For this reason the exercise of listening is essential. That is not only a necessary condition in a process of mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence, but also a pedagogical duty in order to acknowledge the values of others, appreciate the concerns underlying their demands and shed light on shared beliefs" (Evangelii gaudium, 253). At the heart of everything is the need of an adequate formation so that, steadfast in ones own identity, we can grow in mutual knowledge.

We must be careful to not fall into a facile syncretism that, in the end, is empty and a harbinger of totalitarianism without values (ibid., 251; 253). A convenient, accommodating approach, that says yes to everything in order to avoid problems (ibid., 251); it would end up becominga way of deceiving others and denying them the good which we have been given to share generously with others. This invites us, in the first place, to return to the foundations.

When we draw near to a person who professes their religion with conviction, their witness and their thought challenge us and brings us to ask ourselves on our own spirituality. Therefore, in the beginning of dialogue there is the encounter. From there the first knowledge of the other is generated. If, in fact, it is assumed that we all belong to human nature, prejudices and falsehoods can be overcome and an understanding of the other according to a new perspective can begin.

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Pope's Audience with Members of the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies

By Barbara Clark

Bruce Epperly peppers his conversation with animated expressions as he talks about his new adventure as pastor of South Congregational Church in Centerville. His volubility seems to be inborn and just flows naturally as he spins stories, lifting an eyebrow or waving an arm in the air, almost impatient to be sitting down. These characteristics might be one reason his pastor, who saw these qualities in Epperly back in the 1970s, helped shift the young mans direction toward one of an outgoing ministry to others.

Epperly grew up in California, no stranger to traditional religious forms his father was a Baptist minister. But young Epperly reached college in the 1970s during the "Age of Aquarius," at a time when love beads and Imagine were assuming relevance over more traditional realms of spirituality. For this young college student, the message of many churches seemed too straitlaced and out of touch for the times; so, looking to feed what he called his own spiritual hunger, Epperly began exploring emerging spiritual disciplines, including Buddhist teachings and Transcendental Meditation.

He then turned back to the traditional Christian church for a time and, mentored by his pastor, began to feel there was something [for him] in the Christian story, now made more inclusive by opening doors to other streams of religious practice. He came to believe that a larger view could enliven the church, and during graduate school began to feel a calling to give back as a pastor and teacher. Epperly went on to complete graduate degrees in philosophy of religion and theology and was ordained as a Protestant minister in 1980, first in the Disciples of Christ denomination, later in the United Church of Christ.

Throughout Epperlys long career as pastor, teacher and speaker, he came to feel that his calling to the pastoral ministry was a practical application of what [he] was learning as he sought to build up an intellectually solid Christian faith. He went on to teach at several theological seminaries and served as a pastor in places like Washington, D.C., Maryland and Pennsylvania.

In 2012 he began looking for a new adventure to stake out over the next decade, and one opportunity that presented itself turned out to be in Centerville. Unlike many folks who gravitate back here after growing up on the Cape or summering here, Epperly had been on Cape Cod only once in his life to meet an incoming ferry. The new opportunity was intriguing, and something about the Cape, he said, made it seem like a place to come to. He and his wife, Kate, also a minister and spiritual life coach, moved to Centerville in 2013, and Epperly has remained enthusiastic about his good fortune and ultimate choice of venue.

His ministry in Centerville has been focusing on the growing number of retired baby boomers moving here, as well as on the many older members of his congregation. The church, he noted, will hold its 218th annual meeting this year, making it a venerable institution in the local community.

Epperly described his church as interested in creative worship. He said the congregation is innovative but appreciative of tradition, perhaps the best of all possible worlds for a man whose roots are in the older evangelical tradition but who has come to embrace the hard questions emerging in the current scientific show me age.

His new book, Finding God in Suffering: A Journey with Job, came out of a Bible study class where Epperly said participants came armed with no holds-barred questions they werent about to pass through the Book of Job with just a cursory look. There was so much meat to the sessions that a book seemed the natural outcome. Epperly said his approach in such classes is to share the best biblical information thats out there and encourage participants to share their own spiritual journeys rather than just accept the least common denominator in any meeting. He aims at accessibility. I want people to read and understand, he said.

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Local ministry feeds mind, spirit

"Gurur Brahma Gurur Vishnuhu:Gurur Devo Maheshwaraha: Gurur Saakshaat Parambramha: Tasmai Shri Guru Veh Namaha:"

Human beings, beggars to millionaires, are same in physical aspects, but differ in having luck/fate. Some people meet accidents and die but some escape miraculously which even modern science can not explain reasonably and terms it as luck/fate. Hindu spiritual astrology explains this subtle difference in terms of theory of karma (bad or good actions of past and present lives). Every living being undergoes its own karma, the law of cause and effect, by which it creates its own destiny based on its thought, words and deeds. Human being undergoes this karma in the cycle of reincarnation.

All things in the universe are coded, identified and accounted by the Creator, i.e., Supreme of Universe. For ex: barcode in a departmental store gives unique details of each and every item. Similarly, data of all living beings (of lower to higher origin and past to present lives) can be derived from the date, time and place of birth of the native. This resembles a barcode of a commercial product which is unique. These details are unique since our planets in the solar system behave like a visible solar system clock which is seen from the Earth with Earth taken as reference point (hence it is not taken as a part of Nava graha). As a result, from the position of planets in our solar system, identification data of each individual can be derived and explained based on above details. These details never superimpose each other since planets move constantly that reflects in dissimilarities in characteristics of each and every person. Here we also have to remember that the human being is a minute sample of Earth, solar system and also the Universe.

We give you an insight into the subject of Spiritual Astro Science, and by analyzing your birth chart help you in suggesting relevant vedic remedies to overcome the problems and difficulties, there by improving the quality of life.

Free consultation will be given to poor people and students who genuinely feel they can not afford to pay the service/consulta-tion charges. However, in case of students, such consultations will be restricted to issues related to studies and career options.

Please go through the following sections for an in-depth and thorough understanding of the above subject.

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