Bell Labs thrived from the 1920s to the 1980s, when it was most innovative and productive institution of the twentieth century. Long before America’s brightest scientific minds began migrating west to Silicon Valley, they flocked to the Bell Labs campus in the New Jersey suburbs. At its peak, Bell Labs employed nearly fifteen thousand people, twelve hundred had PhDs. Thirteen eventually won Nobel prizes. How did they do it? How can we learn from their successes, so we can do it here in Colorado? New Your Times journalist Jon Gertner has written a book that provides some answers. He calls it: The Idea Factory – Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Inside that book, you can learn how radar came to be, and lasers, transistors, satellites, mobile phones, and much more. How on Earth’s Shelley Schlender spoke with Mr. Gertner about his new book.
Hosts: Tom McKinnon and Jim Pullen
Producer: Tom McKinnon
Engineer: Jim Pullen
Executive Producer: Susan Moran
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:42 — 21.7MB)
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Planetary science budget (start time: 15:49). Despite the successes of the Mars missions and voyages to our other planetary neighbors, the White House decided that NASA’s planetary science budget should be drawn down. The hit would be substantial, a twenty percent reduction from 2012. 300 million dollars would be removed from a baseline one and a half billion dollars. We ask Dr. Alan Stern, who has served as the chief of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, about why the planetary science budget should be restored.
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