Charles Townes laser invention and patent dispute

Atomic clocks are at about 10 to the 10th Hertz. It was Isidor Rabi, one of the physicists in the 1930s, who suggested that we could use the vibrations of atoms at very high frequencies as a time standard. Before the laser, they had masers, which came out of radar in World War II — microwave. Laser is light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Before that they had masers, microwave-amplified stimulated emission of radiation. The guy working on masers who invented the laser — there was a patent dispute, just got resolved in the last 10 years. The guy who won the Nobel Prize for the laser was Charles Townes, who at one time was Provost here at MIT. He was at Bell Labs when he did his laser work.