THIS is a story about the laser – and no, we haven’t misspelled it in the title. Lasers produce intense beams of light of a single wavelength by exciting atoms, ions or molecules in a substance and then using photons to stimulate them to release their extra energy as other, identical photons. The word laser stands for “light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation”, and was coined in 1957 by Gordon Gould, then a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York. Strictly speaking, however, Gould got the name wrong.
How so? In 1959, a year before anyone had built…
