What Made Bell Labs Special? Ley in Recent Years, the High Pay and Excellent Working Conditions at Bell Labs Attracted Many Who Might Look Elsewhere Today
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physicsworld.com Christmas books Andrew Gelman What made Bell Labs special? ley in recent years, the high pay and excellent working conditions at Bell Labs attracted many who might look elsewhere today. Second, there was nothing to do at the labs all day but work. I have known lots of middle-aged profes- sors who don’t spend much time teaching but don’t do any research either. At Bell Labs it was harder to be deadwood. Located as it was in the middle of nowhere, the Murray Hill campus was not a place to relax, and if you were going into the lab every weekday anyhow, you might as well work – there was nothing better to do. Several researchers, including Shannon and Shockley, had sharp mid-career productivity declines – but after they left Murray Hill. In my own experience working at Bell Labs for three summers during Bell Laboratories/Alcatel-Lucent USA/AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Hecht Collection the 1980s, I vividly recall a general feeling of comfort and well-being, Innovation central Bell Labs was a legendary place, an Idea Factory. I say this not at all as a along with the low-level intensity Ali Javan (left) and industrial lab in the outer suburbs of criticism of its author, the journalist that comes from working eight-hour Donald R Herriott New York where thousands of scien- Jon Gertner; rather, there was just so days, week after week after week. work with a helium- tists, working nine to five, changed much going on at Bell that it cannot I did the research underlying my neon optical gas the world’s technological history. all fit in one volume. most-cited paper while working in maser at Bell Labs Their inventions included the tran- Perhaps the most impressive part complete freedom for six weeks at in 1961. sistor, cellular communication net- of the Bell Labs story is the worka- Bell Labs during the summer after works and the theory of information, day nature of its successes. Apart completing my PhD. So maybe being The Idea Factory: but amazingly, these were only a from Claude Shannon, inventor of stuck in the lab until 5 p.m. every day Bell Labs and the few of the major contributions to information theory, the labs had no isn’t such a bad thing – though it Great Age of applied science and engineering transcendent geniuses. True, Wil- might be impossible to replicate this American that occurred in this set of famously liam Shockley was a notable figure sort of distraction-free workplace in Innovation close-packed labs. Year after year, and, sure, John Bardeen is the only the Internet era. Jon Gertner Bell Labs scientists refined existing person to have received two Nobel In its heyday from the 1940s to 2012 Penguin Press products and developed entirely new prizes in physics. But they were not the 1970s, a Bell Labs job was said £18.71/$29.95hb technologies. Those of us who spend legendary minds on the scale of to be just like working at a research 432pp time programming are familiar with Fermi, Feynman or Von Neumann. university, except the pay was better, Bell Labs as the home of C, Unix and Hence the fascination of Bell Labs as the equipment was more up-to-date, the statistical package S (forerunner an idea factory where the institution the machine shop was available for of the current open-source standard, gets as much credit as the scientists all your needs and you didn’t have R). And perhaps the most celebrated for the discoveries they made. to spend time teaching or applying Bell Labs achievement in pure sci- So what made Bell Labs special? for research grants. At a university, ence was the 1963 discovery of cos- To start with, it was well run, with research grants can be distorting mic microwave background radiation managers who typically had strong – and mediocre researchers who by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. technical track records of their own, happen to be good at getting them Coming up with the occasional appreciated scientific work and paid can stay on and on and on. At Bell, breakthrough is one thing, but reli- their staff enough to live comfort- the financial motive was not grants ably producing innovation – that’s ably – but not so much that they but contributing to the company’s something special. It gets even cooler could just take their millions and product lines. This seems reason- when you realize that so much was quit. And as Gertner shows, Bell did able to me, both because telephone done at Bell Labs, and for so long, benefit from some special circum- service is a public good and because, that the aforementioned discovery stances. Monopoly profits meant as Gertner notes, the challenges of of Big Bang radiation – along with the company could afford to hire top improving phone service motivated C, Unix, S and various fundamen- scientists and engineers, and with technical advances that benefited tal, Nobel-prize-winning contribu- university jobs not paying very well other areas as well. Although not tions to physics – go unmentioned in and few get-rich-quick opportunities mentioned in the book, Penzias and a new history of the labs called The such as we have seen in Silicon Val- Wilson’s discovery is a good exam- Physics World December 2012 39 Christmas books physicsworld.com ple, since it came as part of an effort that foster a rich exchange of ideas are asking where the next Bell Labs will to get cleaner telephone signals. far more important in eliciting new come from, we as a society should There is, however, an irony here: as insights than are the forces of com- be looking to create and support the Gertner points out, Bell Labs sci- petition.” Although competition has next Massachusetts Institute of Tech- entists spent decades scrubbing the been “superb” at bringing “incremen- nology. Gertner includes a tantaliz- noise out of local and long-distance tal and appealing improvements”, ing story of a proposal in the 1960s telephone calls, but the modern era Gertner argues, “that does not mean to create “Summit University,” a of cell phones reveals that most cus- it has been good at prompting huge research institute in New Jersey that tomers prize convenience and con- advances (such as those at Bell Labs, would have been closely connected to nectivity ahead of sound quality. as well as those that allowed for the Bell and several other nearby indus- In his concluding chapter, Gertner creation of the Internet, for instance, trial labs. The project was not carried gives what I see as his book’s over- or even earlier, antibiotics)”. This all out because the estimated $16m cost riding message. “It is now received sounds reasonable. was deemed too high. In retrospect wisdom that innovation and competi- Gertner concludes that modern that decision seems unfortunate. tiveness are closely linked,” he writes. corporate labs do not allow the same “But Bell Labs’ history demonstrates combination of freedom and long- Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics that the truth is actually far more term thinking associated with Bell’s at Columbia University, US, e-mail gelman@ complicated…creative environments glory days. But perhaps, rather than stat.columbia.edu Tim Maudlin The why and how of it all and nothing plays a central role in for preferring nothing over some- both Jim Holt’s Why Does the World thing, no explanation is required. Exist? An Existential Detective Story Holt finds no flaw in Grünbaum’s and Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe argument, but it still does not feel From Nothing: Why There is Some- right to him, so he presses on with thing Rather than Nothing. By their other philosophers, physicists, theo- titles, one might expect Krauss’s logians and even the novelist John book to answer Holt’s question. But Updike. It makes for an amusing both authors tend to run together two and stimulating, if somewhat pica- distinct questions. One – Holt’s main resque, tale; one recurring motif is Patrick George/Ikon Images/SuperStockGeorge/Ikon Patrick quarry– is “Why is there something that Holt imbibes significant quanti- rather than nothing?” In Krauss’s ties of alcohol while his interlocutors book, the question that predomi- prefer caffeinated beverages. nates is “How can something come Holt’s other interviewees include from nothing?” the theologian Richard Swinburne, The predilection to regard these who opines that the physical world two questions as equivalent is puz- exists because God made it and punts zling, for no-one would confuse the on the question of why God exists. question “Why is the universe mat- Philosopher Derek Parfit focuses on ter rather than antimatter?” with the form that an explanation might the question “How can matter come take, considering how some property Zilch, zero, nada “Nothing” is a tricky concept. Con- from antimatter?”. The fact that of the universe might account for its Scientists and sider Descartes’ peculiar argument “nothing” means different things in existence. Parfit calls such a prop- philosophers on the against the possibility of a vacuum: the two questions makes the muddle erty a “selector”. For the speculative concept of “nothing”. “If someone asks what would happen more severe. The nothing in Holt’s cosmologist John Leslie, the selector if God were to take away every single question is a state of universal and is goodness: Leslie suggests that the Why Does the body contained in a vessel, without total absence: no matter, no fields, universe exists because it is good, and World Exist? allowing any other body to take the no laws, no space, no time, ever.