Bell Labs: Reviving an icon

LOOKING AWAY FROM THE STARS

In 1964, Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson pointed Bell Labs' horn radio telescope to the sky to record radiation signatures emanating from the center of the Milky Way. While calibrating their receiver, they encountered a persistent background noise — a low-level that hum remained constant no matter where in the heavens they looked. The thermal noise registered right at 3° above absolute zero, which turned out to be what cosmologists predicted as the exact temperature of fossil radiation left over from a cataclysmic cosmic event billions of years ago. Penzias and Wilson had discovered the first proof of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang disproved the idea of the static universe, placing its creation instead at a point in history. It proved that the universe is still expanding and that someday it might contract. The Big-Bang theory offered profound implications for not only cosmology and physics, but for philosophy and even theology. What it did not do, however, was advance the science of communications.

It is somehow fitting that the Nobel Laureate responsible for Bell Labs' most purely scientific discovery would oversee the transformation of Bell Labs in the 1980s into a research institution more closely linked to the businesses it supported. Penzias took over as Bell Labs research vice president in December 1981, only a few weeks before a settlement was reached in the eight-year antitrust suit against AT&T.

In terms of funding and staffing, Bell Labs at first wasn't too affected. Despite the multiple divestitures, in 1998, the year Penzias retired, Bell Labs still had 3241 researchers and Lucent's total budget for R&D was $3.2 billion — both still near historical highs. What Penzias had to deal with was a top-down cultural shift at Bell Labs. He had to transform what had essentially become an academic institution into an applied research organization.

“The Bell Labs I joined was the product of a vertical integration and a regulated monopoly,” Penzias said. “Absolutely everything related to the telephone was supplied by the AT&T system. … For a while academic research grew so large there, you could work at Bell Labs your whole life without ever being aware you were working for a telephone company. I put a stop to that.”

After deregulation, AT&T found itself in a competitive market where research no longer was centralized in a few institutions. The company that grew its own silicon and germanium crystals for the first transistor's semiconductor now had to compete in a market that required speed and efficiency.

In terms of scale, Bell Labs had to exit fields that weren't related to the new reduced scope of AT&T, eliminating disciplines such as economics, physiology and even Penzias' beloved radio astronomy. Bell Labs had finally come to resemble the research arm of a telecom vendor. Penzias readily admits that Bell Labs today wouldn't be capable of producing the discoveries he and Wilson made in the 1960s — but not because the caliber of scientists is less or because pure scientific research is now impossible. Alcatel-Lucent is simply not in the satellite business, so it doesn't keep radio astronomers on staff anymore.

“Overall, the direction of Bell Labs is going toward smaller numbers of people and smaller number of things to work on,” Penzias said. “It's the function of a healthy lab and a healthy company alongside of it.” Despite those new boundaries and the refocus on the core business, Penzias never abandoned the commitment to basic research, and to his credit, that research still goes on today.

Steve Simon, director of theoretical physics research, is studying the behavior of matter at the quantum level in hopes of creating a quantum computer that could run circles around today's binary computers (read related sidebar). Sharad Ramanathan, a member of the technical staff, spends his time in Harvard's biology labs watching spiders weave their webs, observing how they build almost perfect geometric designs without the benefit of perspective. He hopes to apply the physics of the spider web to communications systems, creating an “aware” network in which millions of nodes could optimize themselves (read related sidebar).

Bell Labs may no longer be capable of making great leaps in astronomy, said Gee Rittenhouse, the current head of research, but it's conceivable it could make great discoveries in quantum mechanics or biophysics. “Sharad is not solving a communications problem; he wants to understand how a spider builds a web,” Rittenhouse said. “These basic physical problems happen to align themselves with fundamental scientific discoveries.”

But that alignment has to be taken on some faith. Bell Labs has floors littered with once-promising research that went nowhere. Trial and error, hypothesis and experiment are all part of the process, which is why a separation between development and research is critical, said Alice White, the physicist who heads up all Bell Labs' North American operations. If all researchers had to point to a specific product at the end of their work, long-term research would never get done, she said.

“Being connected to the businesses is very seductive,” she said. “You can get swallowed up in it. You need to have some kind of separation between the business and research if you want to think toward the future. Otherwise you get caught up in the moment.”

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