Talking Networks, Disease, and Yes, Dry- Cleaning With Arno Penzias, Nobel Laureate

摘要

On May 1, Nobel laureate and Bell Labs chief scientist Arno Penzias retired after 37 years with AT&T and Lucent. The day before he signed off, he joined a group of FORTUNE editors for lunch and gave them a taste of the wit and keen intelligence that helped make Bell Labs preeminent. In retirement, Penzias, 65, will continue to work out of his home office on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, where he and his wife enjoy a view stretching from Lombard Street in the west to Alcatraz in the north to the Bay Bridge in the east. He'll scout new companies and technologies for Lucent and for New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm (FORTUNE columnist Stewart Alsop is a partner). Penzias-who won the Nobel in physics in 1978 for his discovery with Robert Wilson of background radiation emanating from the Big Bang-says he wants to be a "tech grandfather" to up-and-coming startups looking to turn a concept into a business. "I don't yet have that Silicon Valley sense of what's hot," he says, "but I can go in and look under the smoke and see what they really have. "As the lunchtime interview that follows amply demonstrates, startups would be wise to pay attention.