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Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/08/bell-labs-kills.html
The pull quote is "In the new innovation model, research needs to keep
addressing the need of the mother company," he says.
And so we see the word "innovation" lose any last vestige of meaning.
Eric
Eric Siegel
Director and Chief Content Officer
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street
Queens, NY 11368
www.nyscience.org
718.699.0005 x 317
esiegel at nyscience dot org
After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and
countless contributions to computer science and technology, it is the
end of the road for Bell Labs' fundamental physics research lab.
Alcatel-Lucent, the parent company of Bell Labs, is pulling out of
basic science, material physics and semiconductor research and will
instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as
networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and
software.
The idea is to align the research work in the Lab closer to areas that
the parent company is focusing on, says Peter Benedict, spokesperson
for Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent Ventures.
"In the new innovation model, research needs to keep addressing the
need of the mother company," he says.
That view is shortsighted and may drastically curtail the Labs'
ability to come up with truly innovative discoveries, respond critics.
"Fundamental physics is absolutely crucial to computing," says Mike
Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society.
"Say in the case of integrated circuits, there were many, many small
steps that occurred along the way resulting from decades worth of work
in matters of physics."
Bell Labs was one of the last bastions of basic research within the
corporate world, which over the past several decades has largely
focused its R&D efforts on applied research -- areas of study with
more immediate prospects of paying off.
Without internally funded basic research, fundamental research has
instead come to rely on academic and government-funded laboratories to
do kind of long-term projects without immediate and obvious payback
that Bell Labs used to historically do, says Lubell.
Most of the scientists working in the company's fundamental physics
department have been reassigned, says Benedict. Nature Science, which
first reported the news, says just four scientists are left working
the fundamental physics department in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
Benedict wouldn't confirm or deny that.
Computing and wireless technologies owe much to advancements in
physics, though the connection may not always be immediately apparent.
An example is the Global Positioning Systems or GPS.
For instance, an integral element of GPS are atomic clocks, which
stemmed from the creation of the hydrogen maser.
The hydrogen maser, or hydrogen frequency standard, uses the
properties of a hydrogen atom to serve as a precision frequency
reference.
"GPS is based on very accurate timing mechanisms," says Lubell. "So
the measure of time and the frequency standards that are used to do it
date back to research in optical pumping which led to the development
of hydrogen maser."
In the past Bell Labs was the place where such fundamental research
that impacts the fields of both computing and physics could meet.
Bell Labs was founded in 1925 by Walter Gifford, then president of
AT&T. AT&T, a monopoly, established Bell Telephone Laboratories,
popularly known as Bell Labs, as a joint venture with Western
Electric, AT&T's manufacturing subsidiary.
The Labs became the Mecca for researchers in science, computers and
mathematics. Deregulation, however, forced AT&T in 1995 to spin off
Bell and other parts of the company into Lucent Technologies. The move
marked a shift in fortunes for the research arm as research budgets
came to be trimmed and Alcatel-Lucent faced increasing pressure from
stockholders.
"Bell Labs could do the kind of fundamental research it did in the
past because it was functioning as part of a monopoly," says Lubell.
"With that gone the landscape changed dramatically."
In recent years, Bell Labs' physics unit had its share of controversy
when researcher J. Hendrik Schön was found to have published data in
the area of molecular-scale transistors between 1998 and 2001 that had
been manipulated and falsified.
That's a long way from where the Labs once stood with its position as
a Nobel Prize magnet.
In 1937, Bell Labs researcher Clinton Davisson shared the Nobel Prize
in physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.
Nearly twenty years later, in 1956 came the Nobel prize for inventing
the transistor and it was shared by William Shockley, John Bardeen and
Bell scientist Walter Brattain.
In the seventies, Bell Labs won two Nobel prizes in physics back-to-
back in the years 1977 and 1978. Philip Anderson shared the Nobel for
developing an improved understanding of the electronic structure of
glass and magnetic materials. The next year Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson were feted for their discovery of cosmic microwave background
radiation.
Former Bell Labs researcher Steven Chu shared the Nobel in 1997 for
developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. A year
later Horst Stormer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui were awarded a
Nobel for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall
effect.
In the last few years, Lucent has sold its semiconductor business and
that means research in areas connected to that had to be scaled back,
especially in areas such as integrated circuits and
Microelectromechanicals Systems (MEMS).
Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent continues to hack away at its jewels. Though
Murray Hill in New Jersey, the company's U.S. headquarters, and the
site of many great scientific discoveries remains safe, Alcatel-Lucent
has sold its Holmdel campus. Holmdel's technological contributions
include contributions to Telstar, the first communications satellite
and Chu's Nobel Prize-winning work.
Still for fundamental physics research there will be life after Bell
Labs, though it will be dependent on the whims of the federal
government.
Increasingly, long-term research is being carried out in universities
and national laboratories with federal grants, says Lubell.
For Bell Labs, yet another chapter in its storied history of comes to
a close taking the once iconic institution closer to being just
another research arm of a major corporation.
Photo: William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invented the
transistor in 1947. (Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Labs)
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