Matt Springer is a graduate student of physics at Texas A&M university. He is also an occasional writer and tinkerer, and he is probably too curious for his own good.
when you order from Amazon, and a fraction of the purchase price will be sent to me at zero cost to you. Much obliged, and thanks for your patronage.Physics is a continuous thing, progressing steadily forward with only rare dramatic leaps. This is not the kind of style that makes for flashy news stories in the popular press. When there are interesting things being reported, they're usually wrong. "Faster than light" laser pulses, quantum teleportation, invisibility cloaks... if it's in the popular press it's probably not anything remotely resembling what they tell you it is. It's like asking me to report on avant-garde fashion.
But every once in a while some interesting things pop up. Today two things did. The first is the sun.
The sun is currently in one of the minimums of its 11-year sunspot cycle. Very unusually it's gone a month with no sunspots at all, and the last few months have had a much smaller number of sunspots than normal even for the low end of the cycle. Why? I have no idea. I'm not an astronomer and I'm pretty sure even the astronomers aren't sure in this case. The sun is very complicated. It's a fairly constant star as far as stars go (and it has to be in order to support life), but it's interesting to remember that in fact we live around a variable star. Not a very variable one, but a variable one nonetheless.
As far as I know no one anticipates this quiet period causing any problems. Past minimums have been associated with freezes and famines, but from looking at the graph this minimum doesn't seem to be nearly as small or as long as the old damaging minimums. Either way, unlike in science fiction even if it did cause problems humanity is not quite capable of adjusting the output of the sun just yet. It's interesting to watch nonetheless.
The other story is the demise of Bell Labs. Bell Labs was of course the research arm of the Bell telephone monopoly, and was responsible for an unbelievable number of advances and discoveries. It has something of a legendary reputation in the golden age of physics; they collected Nobel prizes by the fistfull.
Long story short, the breakup of the Bell monopoly meant that Bell had increasingly little money to spend on fundamental research. Bell Labs was split off the company into Lucent and lasted for another decade or so before finally calling it quits. Overall the increased competition in the telecommunications industry is probably a good thing for the country at large, but the loss of Bell Labs is a bitter price to pay. Cross your fingers that someday another huge company will take an interest in fundamental physics and create their own new institutes. Gates? Jobs? Heck, Carlos Slim? I've got a proposal for y'all...
Physical Science
Comments
I'm not an astronomer either but the sunspot thing is really exciting! Why ... because we thought the sun would do one thing and then it went and did something completely different. Which means there's something out there we don't understand, which means somebody is going to make a name for themselves when they can explain it.
Posted by: NoAstronomer | September 3, 2008 10:39 AM
The researchers at Bell Labs didn't disappear. They went to academia after the Bayh-Dole Act (which let's universities take title to patents). Most wanted the academic freedom, and universities have a cost advantage over even the largest corporations in doing very early stage R&D because of their non-commercial purposes for setting up labs.
The latest chapter, however, is that rather than cooperating through tech transfer (which simply cannot keep up at most universities) many universities now end up in litigation with industry. Changing norms (both cultural and legal) is hard.
Posted by: Michael F. Martin | September 3, 2008 11:30 AM
Posted by: Anonymous | September 3, 2008 11:44 AM
I second Michael martin's comment, and add this:
I just finished a story for PHYSICS WORLD on the subject of Bell labs' demise and what this means for industrial physics, so the issue is fresh in my brain. And I interviewed lots of industrial physicists to boot. As wonderful as Bell Labs was, it was an unsustainable model for corporate R&D, only made possible because AT&T held a monopoly for so long. With the breakup into "baby Bells," that model began to disintegrate. We're just seeing the death throes, which should have come up about much, much sooner. There is unlikely to be anything like the old Bell Labs again. But nobody I spoke with thought that in the long run this would destroy creativity and innovation.
While I, too, am sorry to see the end of the old Bell Labs, my impression is that it was artificially propped up out of nostalgia for far too long. (It's been on life-support for years.) Is it really the job of industry and corporations to fund basic research? Shouldn't the federal government step up for that?
The other point my sources made was that the attitude of "I'll do the 'pure' basic research and all the applied stuff is just the engineering details" is hopelessly outdated and also needs to change. Even Bell Labs is still doing some basic research: it's just tied to specific problems. In today's corporate settings, including entrepreneurial start-ups, nobody is arguing over whether something is "basic" or "applied" -- all they care about is, what problem am I trying to solve, what do I need to better understand to solve it, and what are the most creative ways to go about exploiting what I discover in the process?
Human nature resists change. And change brings a certain degree of growing pains. But it's not inherently bad, unless we are unwilling to adapt.
Posted by: Jennifer Ouellette | September 3, 2008 12:01 PM
and you base this on...? the last i recall, getting a landline or a straightforward cell phone plan in the US was a byzantine mess and in the long run not really cheap. in japan the landline monopoly works quite well. it's cheap, full-featured and easy to understand. there is some cell phone competition, but it's tightly controlled yet allows for cheap, innovative and accessible communication.
in both cases customers are happy and companies are profitable. do you have both in the US?
Posted by: greg | September 3, 2008 12:15 PM
Hence the "probably", greg. But my guess would be that the difference between the US and Japanese is probably not mainly a function of the number of companies. The US telecom regulatory structure is pretty byzantine as well, and companies that can afford enough lawyers can bend the system to their benefit at the expense of the consumer.
Posted by: Matt Springer | September 3, 2008 1:48 PM
If you have a large warehouse, with a small (maybe half cm) hole in the wall or roof, one may find an image of the sun thrown onto the ground or a wall. During a partial solar eclipse, these will show the sun's face with a bite taken out of it. And I've seen sun spots the same way, but not any right now.
Posted by: Carl Brannen | September 3, 2008 2:44 PM
the telecommunications industry is exactly why U.S. science education needs a good fixer upper
Posted by: Paul Johnson | September 3, 2008 9:41 PM
If you have a large warehouse, with a small (maybe half cm) hole in the wall or roof, one may find an image of the sun thrown onto the ground or a wall. During a partial solar eclipse, these will show the sun's face with a bite taken out of it. And I've seen sun spots the same way, but not any right now.
Which is exactly how Johannes Kepler first observed a sunspot but he thought, erroneously, he was observing a transit of mercury, sunspot being unknown in Europe at that time.
Posted by: Thony C. | September 4, 2008 9:34 AM
I read stories like this, then I look at conservatives' attitudes towards academia and government-funded research and the corporate world's utter contempt for any research that can't be turned into a product almost immediately, and I wonder how people reconcile this.
Maybe they should have sold the Labs off to a major university -- Princeton? NYU? UPenn?
Posted by: Brian X | September 6, 2008 1:54 PM