诺 贝 尔 奖 得 主 学   术   报   告

A Conversation with “Nobel Prize Venture Capitalist”

2005 TEEC Speaker Series

报告题目： From the Big Bang to big bucks

从宇宙大爆炸说起，爱因斯坦的真知灼见如何改变了信息科技、医药及能源，与大家共同分享爱因斯坦理论是如何改变现代信息技术、医药和能源的层面。

报 告 人：Arno Penzias博士，1978年诺贝尔物理学奖获得者，贝尔实验室首席科学家，美国最大的风险投资公司NEA合伙人。

主办：理学院，信息学院，经管学院

协办：IEEE清华大学学生分会

报告人介绍：

Back in the early 1960s, Arno Penzias and a colleague at Bell Labs, Robert Wilson, set out to study radiation emissions in the Milky Way. During their observations, their horn antenna kept picking up an inexplicable, ubiquitous background noise. This turned out to be a remnant of the Big Bang, and the two won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978.

A long-time Chief Scientist of AT&T Bell Labs, the life of Penzias would change forever after a visit from Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs in 1997. Penzias recalls Jobs telling him that Bell's inventions would never be marketed and change the world in the way they could if they were fostered in a smaller, less conservative company. "He really let me have it," Penzias says. "I found myself being so upset and angry, but I thought to myself, “If I didn't think there was something right about what he said, I wouldn't get this angry”.

That experience, prompted Penzias to move to California to "see what Silicon Valley was all about." Once out west, he contacted venture capital firms and asked if he could sit in on company presentations. Later on, Penzias decided to join the largest early stage US venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA) as a venture partner, helping to shape entrepreneurial innovation for generations to come.

Though he came late to the business world, Penzias took to it easily by all accounts at NEA. With about 20 patents to his credit and about 24 honorary degrees from numerous universities, he is continually working on new inventions that can help startups along the way. He sits on the boards of several companies, including Alien Technology, a Morgan Hill, Calif., maker of radio frequency identification chips and Konarka Technologies, a Lowell, Mass., developer of plastic that converts light to energy.

报告摘要：

Much of modern physics stems from three epoch making papers, published in the single year of 1905, by a unique individual Albert Einstein: the Photoelectric Effect, establishing the quantum nature of light; an explanation of Brownian Motion, linking a macroscopic phenomenon to the mass of individual molecules; and Relativity, creating a framework for probing the relation of space, time and energy to one another.

Looking ahead to the century we are now entering, the understanding gained in these three areas offers opportunities for addressing urgent issues facing human society—as well as the natural environment upon which life, in all its forms, depends. In this talk I will discuss their emerging applications in information technology, medicine and alternative energy, drawing from my 50-year experience as a scientist, a research manager and a venture capitalist.