Physicists are IBMers too!
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010079
Rolf Landauer, who pioneered the physics of information processing, was born in Stuttgart, Germany, on this day in 1927. After earning his PhD from Harvard University in 1950, he spent two years at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio. But for the rest of his life, he worked at only one place: the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.
Landauer not only conducted research himself, he also managed researchers. His contributions to physics were numerous and lasting. For a summary of them, read the obituary that appeared in Physics Today‘s October 1999 issue. You’ll be as impressed as I was.
Leo Esaki is also an IBMer. In 1973 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his experimental investigations into electron tunneling in semiconductors. Two other IBMers, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, won the 1986 physics Nobel for developing the scanning tunneling microscope. A year later, IBMers Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller won the physics Nobel for discovering high-temperature superconductivity.
Despite those past triumphs, despite its current and vigorous programs in carbon-based electronics, quantum information, and other physics fields, IBM and its ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather, chose not to include physics in its award-winning 2010 Smarter Planet TV ad campaign .
I’ve never been involved in developing an ad campaign, but if the process resembles what’s shown in the TV series Mad Men, the initial work entails identifying goals and concepts. Next comes the challenge of translating those concepts into slogans, scripts, and images.
I don’t doubt IBM’s physicists are engaged in building a smarter planet. But perhaps their work, being too distant from either commercialization or solving an immediate problem, struck Ogilvy & Mather’s creatives as unpromising material for a campaign.
That distance, however, could make a compelling concept for a new campaign. Imagine an ad that links what Esaki and his fellow laureates were working on decades ago to today’s technology. The ad could then shift its focus to IBM’s current portfolio of physics research and ask its audience to wonder at its future promise.
