A physicist, Prokhorov helped lay the groundwork for the development of the laser. “Many believed that we had gone crazy, that it was impossible,” he once said. “Before that no one had said it was possible to create a generator of optical range. Then it became a new, independent science: optics.”
For his work, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 (with another Russian and an American). But he refused to conform to the Soviet ideal, defiantly listing dissident Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov when he edited the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and turning down a position in the Soviet parliament, declaring “I am not a politician. I am a scientist.” He died January 8 in Moscow from pneumonia. He was 85.