William Thomas Silfvast is an American physicist well known for his contributions to gas discharge lasers, soft x-ray lasers, and as the author of the influential textbook Laser Fundamentals. and also several thriller novels (see billsilfvast.com). Silfvast received his PhD in Physics from the University of Utah and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford. He then spent much of his career at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, with a Guggenheim Fellowship at Stanford in 1982-83. Later he became a professor and chairman of the Physics Department at the University of Central Florida's Center for Research in Electro-Optics and Lasers (CREOL). Silfvast remains a Professor Emeritus at UCF, and is now retired and living in Oregon. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of Amer