Book Reviews

Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Are We Alone?

The UFO Phenomena

Big Ear Two - Listening for Other-Worlds

Planet Quest - The Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems

After Contact - The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life

ISBN 0-306-45621-4

Telescope Control

ISBN 0-943396-53-0

Optical Communication Receiver Design

Handbook of Laser Wavelengths

Worlds Unnumbered - The Search For Extrasolar Planets

Sharing the Universe - Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life

Strangers in the Night

On page 325, as a note to page 175 in Chapter 6 it says:

"tune in to join the party".  Not everyone agrees on this choice of wavelength [the Cosmic Water Hole at 1420 MHz].  Stuart A. Kingsley, at Ohio State University*, thinks we may find success at optical wavelengths.  See http://www.coseti.org.  On page 338 the URL is given again.

*Note that I have no affiliation with OSU, just an OSU SETI Group volunteer email address.

Other Worlds - The Search For Life In The Universe

Chapter 13, page 232 contains a paragraph with a brief reference to the fact that "Maybe lasers will turn out to be better".   Charles Townes is mentioned in the same chapter, on page 226, but only with reference to the fact that he has been involved in SETI and was "the inventor of the laser".  Actually it was its microwave precursor - the maser - that Dr. Townes co-invented with Dr. Arthur L. Schawlow, then both working at Bell Telephone Laboratories at Murray Hill, New Jersey.  Townes shared a Nobel Prize in physics for this work on "the maser/laser principle" in 1964 with Nikolai Basov and Aleksander Prokhorov, four years after the first laser was invented.  Indeed, the first lasers were called "optical masers".  See Schawlow and Townes classic paper "Infrared and Optical Masers", Physical Review, Vol. 112, pp. 1940-1949, December 15, 1958.  The first laser was the ruby laser and was invented by Dr. T. H. Maiman in 1960.  In 1961, Townes was the first to suggest the use of lasers for SETI with his colleague Dr. Schwartz.

I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Schawlow in the early 70's when I was a postgraduate student at University College London.  I did not meet Professor Townes until the First Optical SETI Conference in 1993.  His papers on "optical heterodyne detection" were some of the first papers I read during my Ph.D. research on coherent fiber optic data highways.  Since I had spent so much of my photonics career working with coherent laser systems, it was natural that I would apply those techniques to Optical SETI when I first got really involved in the subject in the summer of 1990.  The second time I met Townes was immediately after the Second Optical SETI Conference in 1996, on what turned out not to be a particularly good day for me - but that is another story.

Alien Life: The Search for Extraterrestrials and Beyond

"If we look at  the various regions of the electromagnetic spectrum we soon see that the radio region is the one best suited for communication.  Visible light is a possibility; we could, for example, communicate with lasers.  But lasers have severe restrictions compared to radio waves; they are useless if it is overcast, and laser communication is expensive; furthermore, a laser beam would be difficult to detect (the universe is already full of light beams).  Infrared is a region that may become increasingly important in the future, but for now the radio/microwave region is our best bet."

The Science of Aliens

Looking for Earths

Worlds without End

How the Laser Happened

SPIE's OSETI III Conference