"I must confess that, at that time, I had absolutely no knowledge of the slowness of the relaxation processes in the ground state, processes which take place in collisions with the wall or with the molecules of a foreign gas."
Alfred Kastler was a French physicist who received the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is known for developing optical pumping techniques that became foundational in atomic physics. He was born on May 3, 1902, and died on January 7, 1984.