From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Thu Jul 08 1999 - 23:14:49 MDT
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Robert J. Bradbury <bradbury@aeiveos.com> On July 05, 1999
>In a highly competitive environment, you cannot make the
>investments necessary for long term R&D projects.
Nonsense. In a highly competitive environment you must make
long term R &D projects or you're dead.
>You *also* generally *do not* undertake projects that will result in
>the elimination of your market.
Yes, some companies try that, it never works. Just ask IBM how well
their tactic of ignoring the microprocessor for as long as possible
so it wouldn't interfere with their mainframe business worked out.
>Government bureaucracies *do work*, in situations where
>the economic justifications for projects cannot be
>made in industry (who have to watch the bottom line).
Government research is obscenely inefficient but it does sometimes
do some good, even a monkey giving away a vast amount of money would sometimes
fund something worthwhile also. It's unfortunately true that Government does
not watch the bottom line, that's why it wasted 100 billion dollars or so on space
shuttle "science". Instead of watching the bottom line government watches the next
election.
Most of the world's great telescopes were built with private funds donated by rich
men, including the largest of all, the two 394 inch Keck installments on Mauna Kea.
None of the men who gave money for these things expected their telescope to make
a profit. If government wasn't around to steal a large pat of their money people like
this would give even more. I think it's interesting that one of the biggest contributors to
Big Science, Charles Yerkes, made much of his money by building street car
lines, until government put him out of business when they decided they could
run them much, much better.
The first laser was made in May 1960 at the PRIVATE Hughes Research
Laboratory by Harold Maimam. True, it was called a solution in search of a problem
until 20 years later when private companies in Japan found a way to mass
produce semiconductor lasers and started using them in CD players and Corning
glass used them in fiber optic lines.
A very small company, Geron Corporation, found a , key to cellular aging. Another small
company found a way to clone mammals.
The breakthrough on High Temperature superconductors was made by IBM at their
Zurich laboratory, Muller and Bednorz, both IBM employees received Nobel
prizes. The very same IBM lab also made what is unquestionably the single
most important advance in Nanotechnology up to this point, The Scanning
Tunneling Microscope and earned another Nobel prize for IBM employees Binnig
and Rohrer. IBM is also where the newer Atomic Force Microscope and Magnetic
Resonance Microscope were invented.
60 years ago Bell Labs discovered that some radio waves come from space and built
the world's first radio telescope, more recently Bell Labs revolutionized Cosmology
by detecting the 3 degree Kelvin black body background radiation from The BIG BANG
and got a Nobel Prize for it. Bell Labs also invented the transistor and got another
Nobel Prize for that. Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit,
INTEL invented the microprocessor to fulfill a contract from a Japanese
calculator company.
A lot of good work comes from private universities. MIT was started in 1845
mostly with Erastus Bigelow's money, using the vast fortune he made in the power
loom manufacturing business. CAL TECH is also a privet institution, so is Harvard,
so is Yale, so is Princeton, so is Carnegie Mellon, so is The Institute For
Advanced Study, so is Stanford. Speaking of Stanford, Calvin Quate of that
privet university used an Atomic Force Microscope invented at IBM to make the
worlds smallest transistor. He was able to make lines less than 100
nanometers wide.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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