WIKIMEDIA, DUTCH NATIONAL ARCHIVESLong-time Harvard University physicist Nicolaas Bloembergen, a pioneer in laser technology that led to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), died last month (September 5) at his home in Tucson, Arizona, after suffering a heart attack. He was 97.
“He was one of the major intellectual forces in the explosion of science and applications related to the laser,” John Armstrong, a retired IBM research director and a postdoc in Bloembergen’s lab in the 1960s, tells The New York Times. “There are a thousand applications of lasers, not only in surgery but in all forms of manufacturing and all forms of diagnostics for material properties.”
The Netherlands native studied physics at the University of Utrecht, earning the equivalent of a master’s degree in 1943 in the midst of upheaval following the German invasion of 1940. He then crossed the Atlantic to attend graduate school at Harvard University, working in the lab of physicist Edward Purcell, who would later earn a Nobel Prize for his discovery ...
