Ches’s blog
Ches’s blog
Wired reports the end of basic physics research at Bell Labs (http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/08/bell-labs-kills.html).
In reality, it has been evaporating for years. The parking lot next to building 1 has been dishearteningly empty for years. In fact, the last Nobel prize work was done at the Labs in the early 80s, before my time.
Best sentence from the article: “Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent continues to hack away at its jewels”.
This is not Alcatel-Lucent’s fault, of course. It isn’t easy funding basic research, and justifying it on the shareholders’ dime.
Still, this is one of those basic political problems: how do we fund a variety of basic research programs in our country? We need a thousand flowers blooming, and the soil is different in corporate research compared to government and university efforts.
It still feels a bit like Bell Labs here at AT&T Labs. The corporate environment offers numerous research problems to solve, and often a grateful corporation for those solutions. There are no grant proposals, and it is easy (encouraged!) to walk down the hall and collaborate with experts in other fields. These are the strengths of corporate research that lead me back to it from the startup world.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Hacked jewels