Charles Townes

Charles Townes was an American physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics in 1964.

Towners graduated with a bachelor's degrees in physics and modern languages from Furman University in 1935. He then completed his M.A. in physics from Duke University in 1936 and his Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1939. His wrote a thesis on isotope separation and nuclear spins. He worked at Bells Lab and later joined the faculty at Columbia University. Towner headed the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, D.C from 1959-1961 . From 1961-1967, he served as provost and professor of physics at MIT. He joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967. Currently, he works at Berkeley.

Towner is a Protestant Christian, and is a member of the United Church of Christ. According to Towner, "science and religion [are] quite parallel, much more similar than most people think and that in the long run, they must converge"