Another shitty move by (Alcatel-)Lucent, who wrecked Bell Labs and blew all of my stock money…
Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research
By Priya Ganapati
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.”
(continued at http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/08/bell-labs-kills.html)
In case you weren’t previously aware, here’s a list of some of the great inventions to come out of Bell Labs in the past:
At its peak, Bell Laboratories was the premier facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, and the C programming language. There have been six Nobel Prizes awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories. [1]
- 1937 Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.
- 1956 John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the first transistors.
- 1977 Philip W. Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing an improved understanding of the electronic structure of glass and magnetic materials.
- 1978 Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills the Universe in the microwave band of the radio spectrum.
- 1997 Steven Chu, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
- 1998 Horst Stormer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect.
Yes, that’s the transistor, the laser, UNIX, and the C programming language, let alone everything else they invented.
Thanks again, (Alcatel-)Lucent. Great job. :-(