Foundation
Honoring Peter Franken
Submitted by Michael Bass
My mentor was Peter Franken, he of second harmonic generation who showed that with the advent of lasers the nonlinear properties of matter could be studied. I was a first year graduate student in 1960-61 when I saw the ruby laser at work and I decided that anything that could make that much light had to be worth studying. So I made Peter a deal. If I could work with the laser I would work with him. It turned out that he liked my bold approach even though I had no idea where that came from.
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