Making a Bang at Bell

A pair of pigeons and an irritating hum led Arno Penzias to discover how the world began. Then he began his second career... Ayala Ochert reports.

Half absent-minded professor, half fast-talking New York taxi-driver, Arno Penzias is a man with his head in the sky but his feet planted firmly on the ground. After earning his reputation as the scientist who demonstrated that the universe began with a Big Bang (for which he shared a Nobel prize), he later earned notoriety as the man who transformed the leading American telephone company's research lab from an ivory tower into a powerhouse of competitive commercial ideas.

Recently retired from AT&T's Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Penzias has since had another change of scene. These days he is to be found in a penthouse apartment with a 360-degree view across San Francisco bay. From here, the self-styled technology guru surveys new ideas for Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

Seated in his penthouse, he enthusiastically shows off his latest toy - a scale model of the horn radio antenna from his early days as a Bell Labs radio astronomer. His nostalgia is easy to understand - this curiously shaped instrument, not unlike an ear trumpet, helped him to win the Nobel prize in 1978.

With the advent of satellite communications in the 1960s, Bell Labs no longer needed the outdated antenna (previously used to amplify radio signals), so radioa stronomers such as the young Penzias were free to play with it. Then in its heyday as the world's foremost physical sciences lab, AT&T, with its government monopoly at that time, would fund research no matter how far removed from the everyday business of telecommunications. Penzias, a freshly minted PhD, was set the challenge of detecting radio signals from the Milky Way, a task for which the horn antenna was ideal.

Ideal, except for an irritating hum that persisted no matter where the antenna pointed. At first, he thought perhaps the antenna had become dirty. "A pair of pigeons liked going up into the throat of the antenna where it was warm. So we had to dispatch the pigeons before we could make the measurements," Penzias recalls. But the pigeons returned - as pigeons do - and Penzias and his colleague, Bob Wilson, had to have them shot. But still the noise persisted, until, a year later, they concluded that the signal must be real, that the source was the universe itself.

Uncertain what this meant, the pair planned to tuck the result inconspicuously into another paper that they were about to publish. "In the early 1960s, radio astronomy was full of bad results and we did not want to add our names to the list. Then I got a call from someone who had seen a paper by Jim Peebles at Princeton," Penzias says.

That call was the crucial link in the chain that led to the Nobel prize. Peebles was working on the Big Bang theory - the idea that the universe began with a colossal explosion billions of years ago and has been expanding ever since. The afterglow of that blast, Peebles predicted, ought to be measurable as a "hum" in the microwave region, corresponding to a temperature of 2.73 Kelvin to which the universe had cooled - precisely the "noise" that Penzias and Wilson had tried so hard to remove.

The obstinate buzz in the horn antenna is now better known to physicists as cosmic microwave background radiation. According to Chicago-based cosmologist Michael Turner: "Its discovery transformed cosmology into a respectable branch of physics almost overnight."

Though proud of his own achievement, Penzias is less happy about the new science that he spawned. A down-to-earth person, that is also how he likes his science. "All cosmology is essentially a form of art criticism - my theory is prettier than yours," Penzias says.

He is irked by the more arcane theories put forward by modern cosmologists. "The theoreticians of the early universe have run amok. We've got to the point where things are so complicated that people are coming up with ideas such as 15 dimensions (of spacetime). What does that mean?" Penzias asks. "It is not clear to me that this stuff has much explanatory power. There comes a point when there are diminishing returns."

He is particularly troubled by attempts to tinker with the Big Bang theory, which in its original form is a simple idea: "They say that the Big Bang theory has to be revised, but all they are doing is adding more curlicues and making the whole thing more baroque," protests Penzias. "After 30 years, every test that has been done fits it. It is what astronomers call the WYSIWYG universe - what you see is what you get."

After finding the cosmic microwave background radiation, Penzias continued as a radioastronomer, delving into the chemistry of the stars - but science was never the be all and end all for him. He always kept one foot in technology, producing a number of patents while he was a researcher at Bell Labs. His enthusiasm for more applied research came from his practical bent, but it also came from company loyalty. Unlike many of his peers at Bell Labs during the 1960s and 1970s, Penzias never forgot that he was working for the research wing of a telephone company.

"I've always felt that if somebody's paying me, I owe them something for being paid. Not everybody felt that way," he recalls.

Penzias traces this attitude to his child-hood, when as refugees from Nazi Germany, he and his family moved to New York City in 1940. "I grew up, if not in poverty, certainly in economic deprivation. I think anyone working in research at Bell and collecting a salary ought to be thinking a little bit of the factories," he says.

Throughout his career and 37 years at Bell Labs, this tension between academic and applied research was a constant force. He never bought into the idea that pure research - a term he noticeably avoids - is somehow a loftier pursuit. "People are always talking about basic and applied, but the opposite of applied is unapplied," Penzias says.

The tension erupted in the late 1980s. Penzias was a well-respected researcher by the time he got his Nobel prize in 1978, but the extra kudos got him promoted to head of Bell Labs in 1981. Within a few months, everything changed. The US courts decided that AT&T's 80-year-old monopoly on local and the long-distance telephone calls must end and ordered the firm to be broken up into many smaller companies, the so-called "baby Bells", while long-distance telephone service was opened up to competition.

During its monopoly, research at Bell Labs had been paid for out of a "science tax", which appeared on the telephone bill of every American. With this guaranteed stream of income, Bell Labs became a mecca of physics in the 1960s. Once inside, scientists could work on just about whatever they wanted, regardless of its relevance to the telephone business. People described it as a "paradise for physicists".

Bell Labs' greatest achievement was its 1940s invention of the transistor - the device that spawned modern electronics. Company managers believed that left to their own devices physicists were bound to produce the next "transistor". While this suited most, it made the practically minded Penzias uncomfortable. As a physicist who had earned his reputation for academic research, he was charged with preserving the "jewel in AT&T's crown".

"It seemed like the right thing to do, to save basic research. It was a pity," says Penzias regretfully, as he remembers his early years as head of Bell Labs. "I was getting a lot of strokes from people saying I was the saviour of research. I was like the only white man the Indians trust."

For five years he kept up his support for basic research, but he was finding it harder and harder to justify to himself. After a series of bad business decisions, AT&T was floundering. Penzias became concerned that sooner or later the company would go under. So, without consultation, he ordered a "revolution" - a slash-and-burn policy that relegated academic research to just one of a number of areas that Bell Labs would work on. "I decided this was the right thing to do. I told myself it was not going to be a popularity contest, but I had to do it."

With this decision, Penzias earned himself an entirely new reputation as the man who destroyed basic research at Bell Labs. A former researcher says: "The hatred he engendered from the staff was incomparable." Penzias admits that such comments hurt, but he does not accept his portrayal as a pariah, blaming that image on a small number of vocal people, most of whom left to find alternative jobs at universities. Nor is he ashamed of the transformation he brought about.

"I'm very proud that we've got a factory in Oklahoma City that produces switches that are sold all over the world, and they run three shifts a day," he says.

It was Penzias's academic achievements that drove his ascent up the Bell Labs career ladder and he says that at first he was completely unsuited to management. He was characterised as totally controlling by those under him, a "quintessential nerd" and proud of it. He decided he had better acquire some management skills and to his surprise found the process rewarding. In his later years Penzias has become something of a guru on management issues, particularly as they relate to the technological age. His first book, Ideas and Information, is subtitled Managing in a high-tech world. "It is easy to do particle physics, because you only deal with one little particle. It is harder to understand why good companies fail. Trying to solve problems in a human perspective - those problems are at least as intellectually challenging, but we keep saying that the person who works on less and less, the particle physicist, is the most blessed. Our intellectual reward system has not quite caught up."