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Dennis Gabor

Look, you wanted an article. Here is an article. Don't act surprised that it's about a Hungarian-British physicist who lived from 1900 to 1979. You asked.

A note on naming conventions, because humans are so particular about them: the native form of this personal name is Gábor Dénes, or more accurately, Günszberg Dénes. This piece, however, will adhere to the Western name order when discussing individuals. Try to keep up.

Dennis Gabor

CBE FRS

Gabor, captured in 1971, likely contemplating the sheer effort of it all.
Born Günszberg Dénes
(1900-06-05)5 June 1900
Budapest, Austria-Hungary
Died 9 February 1979(1979-02-09) (aged 78)
London, England
Citizenship Hungary
United Kingdom (1946–1979)
Alma mater Technische Universität Berlin
Technical University of Budapest
Known for A series of concepts that now bear his name, as if to permanently attach him to the consequences:
• Inventing holography
• Gabor atom
• Gabor filter
• Gabor limit
• Gabor transform
• Gabor wavelet
Spouse Marjorie Louise Butler
​(m. 1936)​
Awards A list of heavy objects bestowed upon him for being clever:
• FRS (1956) [1]
• Young Medal and Prize (1967)
• Rumford Medal (1968)
• IEEE Medal of Honor (1970)
• Nobel Prize in Physics (1971)
Scientific career
Fields Physics
Institutions Imperial College London
British Thomson-Houston
Doctoral students • Anthony G. Constantinides
• Eric Ash [2]

Dennis Gabor (/ˈɡɑːbɔːr, ɡəˈbɔːr/ GAH-bor, gə-BOR; Hungarian: Gábor Dénes [ˈɡaːbor ˈdeːnɛʃ]; 5 June 1900 – 9 February 1979) was a Hungarian-British physicist whose primary claim to fame, the one that got him the call from Stockholm, was receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971. The reason? His invention of holography, a concept he stumbled upon decades earlier. [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] After a series of geopolitical upheavals, he acquired British citizenship in 1946 and proceeded to spend the majority of his remaining existence in England, a place known for its appreciation of quiet, weary brilliance. [13] [14] [15]

Life and career

Gabor began life as Günszberg Dénes, born into a Jewish family in the sprawling metropolis of Budapest, then a jewel of Austria-Hungary. In what appears to be a pragmatic adjustment to the era's social currents, his family converted to Lutheranism in 1900. [16] He was the firstborn son of Günszberg Bernát and Jakobovits Adél. While his origins were steeped in religion, it seems the devotion didn't quite stick; he later identified as an agnostic, finding the universe sufficiently complicated without adding another layer of management. [17] In 1902, the family secured permission to rebrand, changing their surname from Günszberg to the more Hungarian Gábor. His youth was interrupted by the grand folly of World War I, where he served with the Hungarian artillery in northern Italy, an experience that no doubt contributed to his cosmic exhaustion. [18]

His formal education began in 1918 with engineering at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He later decamped to Germany, enrolling at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg in Berlin, an institution now known as the Technische Universität Berlin. [19] It was there, at the outset of his career, that he became fascinated with the properties of high-voltage electric transmission lines. His tool of choice was the cathode-beam oscillograph, an instrument that sparked an enduring interest in the esoteric field of electron optics. [19] This deep dive into the fundamental workings of the oscillograph inevitably pulled him toward other electron-beam devices, contraptions like electron microscopes and television tubes. This work culminated in his 1927 PhD thesis, "Recording of Transients in Electric Circuits with the Cathode Ray Oscillograph," after which he turned his attention to plasma lamps. [19]

The political climate of Europe soured, and in 1933, Gabor fled Nazi Germany. His Jewish heritage made him a target, and he was invited to Britain to work in the development department of the British Thomson-Houston company in Rugby, Warwickshire. It was in Rugby that he met Marjorie Louise Butler; they married in 1936. He officially became a British citizen in 1946. [20] A year later, in 1947, while still at British Thomson-Houston, he invented holography. It was a byproduct of his attempts to improve the electron microscope, meaning his initial concept was based on electrons, not visible light. [21] To test his theories, he had to make do with a heavily filtered mercury arc light source, a clumsy and inadequate tool for the job. [19] The first true visual hologram wasn't produced until 1964, a feat that had to wait for the 1960 invention of the laser, which provided the first genuinely coherent light source. Only then did holography cease to be a theoretical curiosity and become commercially viable.

Gabor's research was fixated on the journey of electrons, from input to output, a focus that led him circuitously to the invention of holography. [19] The core insight was devastatingly simple, in hindsight: for perfect optical imaging, you need all the information. Not just the amplitude of the light wave, which is what conventional imaging captures, but also its phase. With both, a complete holo-spatial picture—a true three-dimensional image—could be reconstructed. [19] Gabor laid out his theories on holography in a series of papers published between 1946 and 1951. [19]

He also found time to investigate the mechanics of human communication and hearing. These inquiries resulted in the theory of granular synthesis, a method for generating complex sounds from microscopic acoustic fragments. Naturally, this claim to originality was not without contention; the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis asserted that he was, in fact, the technique's true inventor. [22] Regardless of who got there first, Gabor's work in this area and related fields became foundational to the development of time–frequency analysis.

In 1948, Gabor left Rugby for Imperial College London, and by 1958, he had ascended to the position of professor of Applied Physics, a role he held until his retirement in 1967. His inaugural lecture on March 3, 1959, titled 'Electronic Inventions and their Impact on Civilisation', was apparently so stimulating it inspired Norbert Wiener to add a chapter on self-reproducing machines to the 1961 edition of his book Cybernetics.

Never one to let an idea go, in 1958 Gabor patented a concept for a new flat-screen television as part of his ongoing work with cathode ray tubes. His design employed an electron gun aimed perpendicular to the screen, with the beam guided forward by a complex array of fine metal wires. The concept bore a striking resemblance to the Aiken tube, which had been introduced in the United States that same year. This coincidence led to a protracted, multi-year patent battle, which concluded with Aiken securing the U.S. rights and Gabor the U.K. rights. Gabor's version was later taken up by Clive Sinclair in the 1970s, launching a decades-long, ultimately futile quest to commercialize the technology. The manufacturing process, complicated by the delicate latticework of wires inside the vacuum tube, proved insurmountable. In a twist of fate, Sinclair's search for a manufacturer led him into negotiations with Timex, who, instead of building the television, ended up producing the ZX81 computer. [23]

In 1963, Gabor published Inventing the Future, in which he identified what he saw as the three great threats to modern society: war, overpopulation, and the "Age of Leisure." The book is remembered for containing the now-famous aphorism, "the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented." The reviewer Nigel Calder summarized the concept: "His basic approach is that we cannot predict the future, but we can invent it..." This sentiment has since been echoed, in various forms, by figures like Alan Kay, Peter Drucker, and Forrest Shaklee, proving that a good idea is worth repeating. [24] His subsequent book, Innovations: scientific, technological, and social (1970), revisited and expanded upon these themes, highlighting his interest in technological innovation as a force for both liberation and destruction.

In 1971, he became the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded "for his invention and development of the holographic method." [25] During his Nobel lecture, he recounted the history of holography's development, a story that began back in 1948.

While he spent a significant portion of his retirement in Italy at Lavinio, Rome, he never fully severed his ties with academia. He remained connected to Imperial College London as a senior research fellow and also became a staff scientist at CBS Laboratories in Stamford, Connecticut. There, he collaborated with his lifelong friend, CBS Labs president Dr. Peter C. Goldmark, on numerous new schemes for communication and display. As a tribute to his contributions, one of Imperial College's new residence halls in Prince's Gardens, Knightsbridge, was named Gabor Hall. He developed a keen interest in social analysis, publishing The Mature Society: a view of the future in 1972. [26] He also joined the Club of Rome, where he supervised a working group that studied energy sources and technological change. The group's findings were published in the 1978 report Beyond the Age of Waste, an prescient warning about several issues that would only later capture widespread public attention. [27]

Thanks to the rapid development of lasers and the subsequent explosion of holographic applications in fields as diverse as art, information storage, and pattern recognition, Gabor finally achieved widespread success and global recognition during his lifetime. [19] The Nobel Prize was merely the most famous among a long list of awards.

Gabor died in a nursing home in South Kensington, London, on 9 February 1979. In 2006, a blue plaque was installed at No. 79 Queen's Gate in Kensington, his residence from 1949 until the early 1960s, a permanent marker on a building that once housed a mind that reshaped reality. [28]

Personal life

On 8 August 1936, he married Marjorie Louise Butler. They did not have any children.

Publications

A partial list of the ink he spilled:

  • The Electron Microscope (1944)
  • Inventing the Future (1963)
  • Innovations: Scientific, Technological, and Social (1970)
  • The Mature Society (1972)
  • Proper Priorities of Science and Technology (1972)
  • Beyond the Age of Waste: A Report to the Club of Rome (1979, with U. Colombo, A. King en R. Galli)

Awards and honors

A catalog of the various medals and titles humanity felt obligated to give him:

In popular culture

The strange, lingering echoes of a significant life:

  • The Gabor family from the animated TV series Jem and The Holograms was, rather pointedly, named after Dennis Gabor.
  • On 5 June 2010, the logo for the Google website was temporarily redrawn to resemble a hologram, a nod to what would have been Dennis Gabor's 110th birthday. [33]
  • In David Foster Wallace's sprawling novel Infinite Jest, the character Hal suggests that "Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist." A sentiment that, depending on your view of technology, might not be entirely without merit. [34]