The multiple experimental approaches he initiated have forever changed the manner in which chemists, biologist, molecular physicists, and materials scientist interrogate key aspects of nature.
By the early 1970s, just as Fayer was beginning his career, advances in laser technology were occurring to make pulses of light that were short enough to get to the time scales of molecular motions.
Fayer drove the field of ultrafast optical spectroscopy through his developments and use of these new methods to explicate the properties of complex molecular systems.
[1] These first experiments using the free electron laser, which was two football fields long and took a crew to run, set off an explosion of interest in infrared nonlinear methods.
Fayer contributed substantially to the equipment side, but his main creative impact was exploiting the new ultrafast infrared methods and technology for a wide variety of fundamentally important molecular problems.
[3] A 1982 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship,[4] Fayer has been honored with several awards from American Physical Society including the 2000 Earle K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy “For the development of optical and infrared ultrafast spectroscopic methods, and especially for experiments using these methods to measure dynamical processes in condensed phase systems.” and the 2012 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science “For seminal contributions to laser science in the development of ultrafast nonlinear and multidimensional vibrational spectroscopy.”[5] Fayer is the recipient of the 2007 E. Bright Wilson Award in Spectroscopy by American Chemical Society "For his seminal contributions to the understanding of dynamics and excitation transport in complex condensed matter systems, through his development of ultrafast nonlinear laser spectroscopy, transient grating, and infrared photon echo techniques.
"[6] He received the 2009 Ellis R. Lippincott Award by Optical Society of America “For seminal contributions to the understanding of the dynamics and interactions in liquids through development and applications of ultrafast nonlinear vibrational experimental methods and spectroscopy.”[7] Fayer was also announced to be the recipient of the 2014 Ahmed Zewail Award in Ultrafast Science and Technology “For the development of coherent infrared spectroscopy and its applications to measurements of ultrafast dynamics in complex molecular systems.”[8] He is also the 2022 recipient of the William F. Meggers Award from Optica and an Optica Fellow.
The book is popular among non-scientists who are interested in science as well as scientists who are not in the field of molecular physics and want a conceptual understanding of quantum theory without getting bogged down with countless equations.