2015-09-24
I grew up in New Jersey. I left for college in 1966 and have lived in Delaware, Massachusetts, and Maryland since then. Most of my siblings still live in the state. It was a great place to grow up in the 50's and 60's, and no doubt still is. New Jersey doesn't deserve it's reputation as a set of exits off the Turnpike. There are a lot of great things about New Jersey. I'm going to concentrate on the state's contribution to some areas of science and technology that most interests me.
Let's start with Bell Laboratories. The core of Bell Laboratories, previously AT&T Bell Laboratories is located in Murray Hill New Jersey. Bell labs was originally created by Alexander Graham Bell as Volta Laboratory and Bureau. Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language, S programming language and the C++ programming language. Eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.The UNIX operating system. UNIX and C were invented and devoloped at Bell Labs in Murray Hill by software pioneers Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan. You may not know what UNIX is, but it's essence is in your pocket. The iPhone operating system IOS has underpinnings of BSD - the Berkeley Software Distribution which is a UNIX operating system derivative. So does Mac OS X. The Android operating system on all Android phones runs a Linux operating system kernel. The Linux kernel is an independently developed version of the core of UNIX. Most of the heavy lifting on the internet is also done under Linux these days. Most super computers run Linux. Your bank probably runs it's customer facing web applications on Linux. New York Stock Exchange runs trades on Linux. London Stock Exchange also runs Linux. The Large Hadron Collider is managed by and it's data is processed by machines running Linux. The developers of BSD, Linux, and GNU (the utilities that comprise the base user level tools of Linux) include many dedicated and talented folks. Among them, Bill Joy, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Keith Bostic, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman. But it all traces back to the ideas and work of Thompson and Ritchie at Bell Labs in Murray Hill New Jersey.
The C programming was also developed at AT&T Bell Labs. Dennis Ritchie was primarily responsible. It was used in the implementation of the Unix operating system. C is a compiled programming language. It is sufficiently powerful to be quite productive, but at the same time it is close enough to the general architecture of current computer hardware implementations to also be very efficient. This makes it a strong candidate for writing operating systems, computer language interpreters, and compilers. Writing these kinds of systems in C allows them to be very portable across hardware architectures. This is a key reason that the Linux operating system can run on a large range of machines, from phones to super computers.
The remnants of the Big Bang were first detected from New Jersey. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background while working at Bell Labs in Holmdel. They were experimenting with a sensitive horn antenna and the discovery was serendipitous after all sources of interference were eliminated. The discovery of this radiation is strong evidence for the big bang event leading to our expanding universe. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for this discovery.
The IAS Machine. Not only was New Jersey the place where the most widely used software operating system design originated, but New Jersey also figures prominently in the origin of modern computers. Some of the most notable minds in physics and math of the last 100 years were brought together at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton starting in the 1930s. This included Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, Julian Bigelow, Kurt Gödel, Wolfgang Pauli, Freeman Dyson, J. Robert Oppenheimer. IAS was formed as a center for theoretical research. Over the years it has expanded in scope from mathematics and physics to the natural sciences, social sciences, and historical studies. One of the early projects undertaken was the development of one of the first general purpose digital computers. As the Institute's own home page puts it: "At the beginning of computing, one of the first stored program computers was designed and built on the Institute’s campus, and its structure (von Neumann architecture) has influenced the development of today’s computers and formed the mathematical basis for computer software."