Bell Labs announced today that it will be offering a job and a hefty cash prize to any inventor who thinks they have an idea that could redefine the prospective future of information and communications technology.
Bell Labs, the research arm of communication and information giant Alcatel-Lucent, announced today that they are offering a $100,000 prize to a single promising inventor who thinks they have an idea or design that can improve the communication industry "by a factor of 10," according to the Bell Labs Prize statement.
The cash prize will be offered as the grand prize of a competition that will select three winners in all. These winners will have had to create some kind of solution to a problem that required ten times the power, range, space, etc. to be resolved. According to an Alcatel-Lucent press release, this "10 times factor" is simply being used as the definition for a "game changing idea," which is what the competition is calling for.
The competition was launched and announced on Tuesday, as May 20 marks the anniversary of when Bell Labs scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), often simply referred to as the "echo of the Big Bang."
According to Bell Labs, the two scientists stumbled upon the CMB, heard simply as a background noise through instruments in 1964. The men had been trying to determine the cause of this noise, which they initially thought was interference. However, soon they discovered that a number of astrophysicists were looking for the residual "echo" of the Big Bang. When the scientists met up for the first time, history was made.
"We've often said that there was no 'a-ha' moment - we were simply trying to explain something that we didn't understand. It's inspiring to know the implications of one's research, and that you form a part of a vast scientific legacy," Wilson said in a recent press release.
This, Bell Labs claims, was the first "game changer" that inspired the new prize.
And "game changer" may well be right. New research has found ways to measure the CMB to unravel mysteries of the universe that Penzias and Wilson likely never thought possible.
Still, despite appropriate timing, the Bell Lab Prize is dwarfed by another recently announced scientific prize to be awarded for game changing work.
The British Longitude Prize was introduced to the world on Monday, offering a whopping $17 million to the first scientist or team of scientists to develop a solution to "one of the world's greatest problems." Interestingly, the world has yet to decide what that problem will be.