The Bible talks of purposeful creation. What we have, however, is an amazing amount of order; and when we see order, in our experience it normally re… - Arno Allan Penzias

After a painful but largely successful struggle with courses and qualifying exams, I began my thesis work under Professor Townes. I was given the task of building a maser amplifier in a radio-astronomy experiment of my choosing; the equipment-building went better than the observations. In 1961, with my PhD thesis complete, I went in search of a temporary job at Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey. Their unique facilities made it an ideal place to finish the observations I had begun during my thesis work. “Why not take a permanent job? You can always quit,” was the advice of Rudi Kompfner, then Director of the Radio Research Laboratory. I took his advice, and remained a Bell Labs employee for the next thirty seven years. Since the large horn antenna I had planned to use for radio-astronomy was still engaged in the ECHO satellite project for which it was originally constructed, I looked for something interesting to do with a smaller fixed antenna. The project I hit upon was a search for line emission from the then still undetected interstellar OH molecule. While the first detection of this molecule was made by another group, I learned quite a bit from the experience.

In retrospect, the research organization which emerged from the decade following the Bell System’s breakup deployed a far richer set of capabilities than its predecessor. In particular, our work featured a growing software component, even as we strove to improve our hardware capabilities in areas such as light-wave and electronics. The marketplace upheaval brought forth by increased competition helped speed the pace of technological revolution, and forced change upon the research and development institutions of all industrialized nations, Bell Labs included. While change is rarely comfortable, I am happy to say that we not only survived but also grew more capable in the process — seeding much of the information revolution which now pervades the world in which we live. Except for two or three papers on interstellar isotopes, my tenure as Bell Labs’ Vice-President of Research brought my personal research in astrophysics to an end. In its place, I pursued my interest in the principles which underlie the creation and effective use of technology in our society, and eventually found time to write a book on the subject Ideas and Information, published by W.W. Norton in 1989. In essence, the book depicts computers as a wonderful tool for human beings but a dreadful role model for what we humans know as intelligence. In other words, “If you don’t want to be replaced by a machine, don’t try to act like one!”

I was born in Munich, Germany, in 1933. I spent the first six years of my life comfortably, as an adored child in a closely-knit middle-class family. Even when my family was rounded up for deportation to Poland it didn’t occur to me that anything could happen to us. All I remember is scrambling up and down three tiers of narrow beds attached to the walls of a very large room, and then taking a long train trip. After some days of back and forth on the train, we were returned to Munich. All the grown-ups were happy and relieved, but I began to realize that there were bad things that my parents couldn’t completely control, something to do with being Jewish. I learned that everything would be fine if we could only get to “America”.