Bell Labs’ Claude Shannon, creator of modern information theory, developed a mechanical mouse that learned to navigate a changing maze (Image: Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Labs)
“YOU don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” sang Joni Mitchell a generation ago. That lyric should resonate with many physical scientists who over the past few weeks have been lamenting the fall of Bell Labs in New Jersey, formerly the world’s premier industrial research laboratory.
Its star has been fading for two decades, but the knock-out blow came at the end of last year, when the merger of Bell Labs’ parent company Lucent Technologies with…
