Arthur Leonard Schawlow was born on May 5, 1921, in
Mount Vernon, New York, to a
Jewish father from
Riga and a Canadian mother. Schawlow was raised in his mother's Protestant religion. When Arthur was three years old, they moved to
Toronto, Ontario, Canada. At the age of 16, Schawlow completed high school at
Vaughan Road Collegiate Institute, and received a scholarship in science at the
University of Toronto (Victoria College). He obtained his
B.A. in 1941 and his
M.A. the following year. He received his
Ph.D. in 1949 under Professor Malcolm F. Crawford. Schawlow then took a
postdoctoral position with
Charles Townes in the Physics Department of
Columbia University in the fall of 1949. Schawlow went on to accept a position at
Bell Telephone Laboratories in late 1951. He left in 1961 to become Professor of Physics at
Stanford University, where he remained until his retirement in 1991. Although his research focused on
optics, in particular lasers and their use in
spectroscopy, Schawlow also pursued investigations in the areas of
superconductivity and
nuclear resonance. Schawlow shared the 1981
Nobel Prize in Physics with
Nicolaas Bloembergen and
Kai Siegbahn for their contributions to the development of laser spectroscopy. Schawlow co-authored the widely used text
Microwave Spectroscopy (1955) with Charles Townes. Schawlow and Townes were the first to publish the theory of laser design and operation in their seminal 1958 paper on "optical masers", although
Gordon Gould is often credited with the "invention" of the laser, due to his unpublished work that predated Schawlow and Townes by a few months. The first working laser was made in 1960 by
Theodore Maiman. == Science and religion ==