Judging Bell Labs

There has been a lot of media coverage in the last few weeks about the demise of fundamental physics research at Bell Labs. I'm not here to attack the reporting of others, but before I can delve into the details of this column, it's necessary to point out that many of these stories are exaggerated — or at least oversimplified.

Bell Labs hasn't killed off its fundamental physics research. It most certainly has limited its scope, but to say the basic physical sciences are dead at Bell Labs wouldn't be fair. What Bell Labs did was eliminate its material and device physics group, which focused on developing new materials and processes for microelectronics. I won't minimize the importance of that research. If Bell Labs had chosen to continue that work, it might have resulted in some staggering advances in science, such as plastic semiconductors and organic transistors. Telephony last February even profiled some of the scientists and research done in this area: Art Ramirez's efforts toward creating a solar cell from organic materials that literally could be painted on the side of a building to create a cheap, renewable energy source that would go a long way toward solving the world's energy problems.

That research is gone, given up to other institutions and industrial researchers that have a much greater stake in commercializing such technology. But the fundamentals of physics are still alive and well at Bell labs. Materials research supports the nanotechnology group, quantum physicists are tackling the paradoxes of a quantum computer, and the electromagnetic wave is still being tinkered with in the expansive optics and wireless groups.

At some point, pursuing a particular vein of research presents no more commercial value to the company as a whole. The list of research areas Bell Labs has exited for such a reason isn't small: radio astronomy, computer operating systems, even economics. AT&T was regulated out of the satellite communications business, leading to the demise of its radio astronomy research. The same went for operating systems and software when it spun off NCR. Before exiting either of those businesses, though, their respective Bell Labs research groups did some remarkable things: Nobel laureates Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson discovered the cosmic background radiation left behind by the Big Bang, and Turing Award-winners Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created UNIX.