TV Reviews : Bell Chief Informative on ‘A World of Ideas’

In the past, Bill Moyers has talked with ideological gurus, idiosyncratic artists and iconoclastic scientists. To toast his new season of “A World of Ideas” (at 7:35 tonight on Channel 28), Moyers has found a new type to mix it up with.

Meet Robert Lucky, techie with a human face.

Lucky, in case you don’t know, is executive director of the innovative Bell Labs’ communications sciences research division. Although the birthplace of the digital computer and the transistor is not quite what it used to be, Bell Labs remains a hallowed place for pure technological research. A man in Lucky’s position must have some interesting notions.

He does. In his two-part conversation with Moyers, he eagerly leads us into the concept of “the virtual world,” the non-physical realm of information, of bits and bytes. Though he believes in the power of information and recognizes the power of those who control it, Lucky adds this: “Information is made up of nothing. Yet once information appears, it can’t be destroyed.”

Childlike, his eyes light up as he describes how computer networks allow information to proliferate at unprecedented speed. He compares information spread to how a joke can cross the country in days.

Economic power, though, has shifted to East Asia because that region produces, as Moyers terms it, “hard goods.” It isn’t enough, Lucky agrees, to possess pure research when you can’t make things based on that research.