Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research

[phongn]

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, 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.

The era of fundamental research run by corporations seems to be drawing to a close by management chasing after short-term profits. No longer is fundamental research considered sound investment, it seems (even at places like IBM's Watson Research Center).

[DesertFly]

The era of fundamental research run by corporations seems to be drawing to a close by management chasing after short-term profits. No longer is fundamental research considered sound investment, it seems (even at places like IBM's Watson Research Center).

This seems incredibly short-sighted of them. Who is going to be doing the ground-breaking research now? How long before that comes back to these shores? Never?

[Patrick Degan]

Anybody want to take bets on how long Alcatel-Lucent will continue to exist?

[phongn]

To be fair to Alcatel-Lucent, they're not Ma Bell (or even Western Electric), who had truly enormous sums of money to spend on virtually anything they cared to. This new company is much more focused on telecom equipment.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

IBM still funds research into Graphene and Quantum Computing, last I checked.

[Karrick]

At least they didn't close the Murray Hill site altogether. A lot of people from my town work there, and a lot of them were unhappy when Lucent got the place (to say nothing of when they tried to change the name). It's nice to be able to say "They invented the transistor less than a mile from my (parents') house." I guess I won't be able to say something like that about important breakthroughs in the future. Not that such a statement really means anything other than that I live in close proximity to a particular research site.

[phongn]

IBM still funds research into Graphene and Quantum Computing, last I checked.

A good portion of IBM Watson Research is directed or applied research still, though they still do some fundamental stuff (like graphene)

[Alyrium Denryle]

And this kids is why science should not be in the hands of a private enterprise anyway....

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

IBM still funds research into Graphene and Quantum Computing, last I checked.

A good portion of IBM Watson Research is directed or applied research still, though they still do some fundamental stuff (like graphene)

Probably because they needed to get Graphene out of the lab into the wafer fab as soon as possible.

They might not do much in-house fundamental research these days, but they do fund a few research groups that might suit their interest.

[phongn]

And this kids is why science should not be in the hands of a private enterprise anyway....

Why not? Despite its fall from glory, did not Bell Labs provide a wealth of science to the world? What about IBM Watson Research, or the famous HP Labs? The contributions to computer science at Xerox PARC?

Government and academic research are no more immune to budgetary pressure and short-sighted leadership than corporate research.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I would imagine that there will be potential cuts to the federal funding next year due to budgetary pressures. Sigh...

[Admiral Valdemar]

Maybe not computers and telecoms, but if you don't do R&D in bio-tech and pharma then you're dead, both metaphorically and literally in many cases. If the Americans are chasing short-term profits, the Chinese and Indians will go after the bigger fish. I'm pretty sure it's already obvious who's going to be eating who in the not-too-distant future.

[Zixinus]

The first thing that sprung to mind was that Volley would have had his world shattered, yet again, when another one of his delusions are gagged, raped, beaten with a sharp stick, whipped and left in the mud. Companies interested in science? Hell no, they are only interested in marketable products that gets them rich and richer!

Anyway, its a bit sad news. Government research is influenced by politics, the Brussard fusion machine coming to mind foremost (Bussard pissed off a couple of people during his days at the AEC, thus his last project was pretty half-assed). Though, I am sure better examples could be told.