American physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who developed the maser in the 1950s and won a Nobel Prize for this work in 1964. He was a pioneer in microwave and infrared astronomy and led the team at Berkeley which, in 1968, discovered water and ammonia molecules in interstellar space. Townes has a long-standing interest in the possibly of optical SETI and while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s was the first, together with R. N. Schwarz, to suggest the possibility of using lasers for interstellar communication. He is presently involved in a project, funded by the Planetary Society, to search for artificial laser pulses coming from a variety of sources, including nearby stars, globular clusters, and external galaxies.
