Abstract
Today’s communications industry is a leading force in the world’s economy. Our lives would be vastly different without the telephone, fax, cell-phone, and the Internet. The commonplace and ubiquitous nature of this technology, which has been evolving over a period of 125 years,1 tends to overshadow the dominant role that physics and physicists have played in its development.2 The purpose of this review is to explore this coupling and to show that the communications industry has not only made use of the results of academic physics research but has also contributed significantly to our present understanding of fundamental physics. Due to limitations of space, we shall primarily use examples from the Bell System and Bell Laboratories.
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Brinkman, W.F., Lang, D.V. (1999). Physics and the Communications Industry. In: Bederson, B. (eds) More Things in Heaven and Earth. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1512-7_54
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1512-7_54
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