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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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