Dennis Gabor, "Father of Holography"

Abstract

Dennis Gabor was born on June 5th, 1900 in Budapest, Hungary, a country that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. Although physics fascinated him, he finally decided to study engineering. Later he wrote: «Physics was not yet a profession in Hungary, with a total of half-a-dozen university chairs – and who could have been presumptuous enough to aspire to one of these?». Throughout his entire life Gabor always said he was an engineer and inventor rather than a scientist, even though his work was almost always related to applied physics. But Gabor was also a humanist in the sense of the Renaissance: voracious reader, writer, essayist, man concerned about the technological society of the late twentieth century and member of the Club of Rome. Since 1958 he devoted much of his time to study the future of our industrial civilization on which he published, among others, the book Inventing the Future, published in 1963, and where he stated: «You cannot predict the future, but you can create it.»