Click on the image above for the LA Times obituary of Charles Townes, inventor of the laser.
See also a statement at Adherents.com —
From: "'STATEMENT BY CHARLES HARD TOWNES
At The Templeton Prize News Conference, March 9, 2005,'
posted on Templeton Prize official website"—
"Science and religion have had a long history of interesting interaction. But when I was younger, that interaction did not seem like a very healthy one. For example, when I was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, even my professor who was directing my research jumped on me for being religiously oriented. I myself have always thought that science and religion are not unrelated, and should be honestly and openly interacting. Later, in the early 1960s, I was at Columbia University and the men's group of Riverside Church, near Columbia, asked if I would talk to them about my views, since I was one of few scientists they knew who attended church. Surprisingly, a week after my talk someone telephoned to ask if he could publish my talk he had heard on the relation between science and religion. Of all things, he wanted to publish it in THINK magazine of IBM, of which he was editor. Shortly after that, the editor of the MIT Alumni Journal read it and also wanted to publish it in his journal, and did. But a prominent MIT alumnus wrote him that if he ever published anything like it again on religion, he would never have anything more to do with MIT. This of course only encouraged me to provide many other talks and articles on the subject as I was invited, but it reflected a common view at the time among many scientists that one could not be a scientist and religiously oriented. There was an antipathy towards discussion of spirituality."
See as well a post, American Activities, from the above-mentioned date— March 9, 2005— in this journal.
A passage relevant to that post from a review of the recent film Predestination :
"By the end, even bad jokes and tired riddles come together in a giddy concatenation of thought and feeling. When a central character asks, 'Which came first, the chicken or the egg?' he answers for himself: 'The rooster.' We learn that he’s not just being absurd, imbecilic or sarcastic. He’s presaging the movie’s existential triple whammies."
— "Deep Focus: Predestination," by Michael Sragow, Jan. 8, 2015