In 1919, Robert Goddard, a forward-thinking physicist and inventor from Massachusetts, wrote that a rocket powered by liquid fuel could escape Earth’s gravity and land on the moon. “A severe strain on credulity,” scoffed The New York Times, a half century before Apollo 11 cemented Goddard’s reputation as the rocket man whose vision blasted into reality. His story was the inspiration for the panel discussion “Crazy or Brilliant: Betting on High-Risk, High-Reward Science,” sponsored by DISCOVER and the Research Corporation for Science Advancement in collaboration with the New York Academy of Sciences. Last May, physicists Brian Greene and Michal Lipson, venture capitalist Shelley Harrison, journalist Jon Gertner, and DISCOVER editor in chief Corey S. Powell gathered in front of an audience in the academy’s glassy New York offices for a spirited discussion about string theory and supermarket scanners, cranks and geniuses, and how in science, as Bob Dylan once sang, there’s no success like failure.
The Dream Lab
Corey Powell: A half century ago, AT&T was the biggest company in the world, and its R&D arm, Bell Labs, was the archetypal incubator for hatching crazy ideas into brilliant technology. Transistors, satellite communications, and the programming language C were born there. Jon, you’ve studied Bell Labs in detail. What made it so special?
Jon Gertner: There were a lot of different ingredients. Being attached to the world’s largest corporation gave Bell Labs a stream of money and the ability to think long-term in a way that failure was acceptable. They could look 10 years in advance without the problem of making quarterly or year-end results. They could tolerate a certain amount of failure that a business-side executive could not. They also had a keen sense of how disciplines could interact and develop new ideas. They were very careful and intent on combining people in new and different ways. They combined loners and extroverts, people with different personalities, as well as applied and fundamental scientists, and experimentalists and theorists.
Powell: Shelley, you actually worked at Bell Labs during its heyday in the 1960s. What came out of your time there?
