The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  T H E

  IDEA FACTORY

  T H E

  IDEA

  FACTORY

  LEARNING TO THINK

  AT MIT

  PEPPER WHITE

  This book is dedicated to my mother and to the memory of my father.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped and encouraged me along the way to the first publication of this book. Among them were John Mattill, Liz Muther, Linda Simon, Aklilu Gebrewold, Carl Brandt, Bill Newlin, Bill Ijams, and the anonymous editor at Putnam who, in a rejection letter, told me to find a literary agent if I ever wanted to publish this book.

  Thanks also to the MIT professors and friends who reviewed sections of the original version; special thanks to Professor Elias P. Gyftopoulos for permission to use material from his course notes and textbook "Thermodynamics: Foundations and Applications" (Macmillan, 1991), and for his corrections.

  Many thanks to Malaga Baldi, my literary agent. And thanks to the late Alexia Dorszynski, my first editor, who told me not to censor myself and who did not censor me.

  Thanks to Larry Cohen, Editor-in-Chief at The MIT Press, who in the winter of 1984 was the first person to whom I submitted a primitive manuscript. His encouragement at that time helped me persist, and I appreciate the present opportunity to return the book to print.

  Finally, warm thanks to my wife, Elizabeth Ross White, whose review comments greatly improved the new material in this edition.

  C O N T E N T S

  Preface to the MIT Press Edition xiii

  Prologue 1

  1. Logging On 5

  2. Class 17

  3. Break 30

  4. Midterm 45

  5. Funding 60

  6. Finals 69

  7. The Guild 78

  8. The Taskmasters 93

  9. Spring 108

  10. In Control 119

  11. Sigma Delta 134

  12. Two Seventy 145

  13. Is Suicide Painless? 163

  14. Perpetual Motion 174

  15. Hackito Ergo Sum 191

  16. Papa Flash 203

  17. The Joy of Six 215

  18. Results 230

  19. No It Isn't 250

  20. Quality Control 260

  21. Continuing Education 277

  Chapter Notes 287

  Index 309

  Can we not bridge the chasm which thus makes for civil strife within the mind? The extremists on both sides say, no! The poet and the man of faith affirm that only through man's spirit, through intuitive understanding, can he touch true reality. Those who have harder heads will toss this attitude aside as hopeless mysticism, irrational and false. Most men cannot decide on either course, and attempt to live a double life. The Hyde who holds discourse with science is a different man from the Jekyll of art or politics or religion. This divided allegiance is accepted as inevitable by many. ... But such duality can hardly offer a sound basis for any satisfying life philosophy. At best it is demoralizing, at worst, perilous....

  -From Edward W. Sinnott, "Science and the Whole Man," centennial address, Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University, October 1947

  Preface to the MIT

  Press Edition

  "The book wasn't harsh enough."-an MIT Ph.D. who is also a Harvard M.D. (1999)

  "I read it and that's why I wanted to come to MIT."-an undergraduate in an MIT course that included this book as required reading (1996)

  "That book keeps coming up at meetings."-an MIT professor (1993)

  "If you want to see why I haven't given any money to MIT, read Pepper White's book."-a wealthy potential donor to MIT who went there for graduate school (1992)

  "It's the saddest book I've ever read."-a sales clerk at the MIT Cooperative Society (1991)

  I received my master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The first edition of this book was published in 1991. The MIT Press edition appears in 2001.

  Salman Rushdie said that books choose their authors. My father was a science writer, a Harvard-educated engineering major who after World War II worked for Vannevar Bush. My mother is a gifted pianist who has educated me about the spiritual dimension of music. At Johns Hopkins I had a liberal arts engineering undergraduate education, including art history, cinema, foreign languages, and time and opportunity to develop as a person.

  A clerical error led to my being accepted to MIT, through the back door of the "Technology and Policy" program. A generous act led me to a paid research assistantship and a veritable genius as my thesis advisor. An unplanned absence placed me for two years in an undergraduate dormitory. And Professor Warren Rohsenow required me to take the core undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum in addition to my graduate courses. An invisible hand led me through the depths and heights of the Institute.

  Shortly after my father passed away in 1988, I found among his personal papers the Edward W. Sinnott quotation from a prior page, as well as other excerpts of the address. I took it home with me. When attempting a year later to discover what this book was to be about I dusted off the yellowing onion-skin-papered carbon copy and felt goose bumps. It was a gift from my father. The rational and the expressionistic. Dialectical materialism-the state philosophy of the former Soviet Union-and religion. Thesis and antithesis. The tares and the wheat.

  Looking at the book ten years after its first edition, I see it as answering three questions, the first of which is, What is it really like to go to MIT?

  Second, What does it mean to learn to think? The first professor I met told me that it didn't really matter what I learned there, but that MIT would teach me "how to think." What are the small steps that cumulatively form an engineer? How does an engineer learn to solve problems? How does he or she maintain relationships and friendships during the process?

  Finally, What are the limits of mechanistic thinking? Does it lead to isolation, loneliness, burnout, and an unfulfilling life? Can it leave room for the religious, the inspirational, the spiritual?

  This third question has been much discussed in the last halfcentury. Several years after the Sinnott address, C. P. Snow delivered a lecture entitled "The Two Cultures" at the University of Cambridge. In the 1950s, when MIT was embarking on an early effort to bridge the two cultures, Adlai Stevenson is reported to have said that MIT was trying to humanize the scientists, while Harvard was trying to Simonize the humanists. (For younger readers I hasten to explain that "Simonize" was a service that cleaned and polished cars.) As recently as October 21, 2000, the Boston Globe had a front page article entitled "Turning techs into humanists," with the subhead "Schools shaping the whole engineer."

  I was at MIT between 1981 and 1984. I wrote a first draft of the book by scheduling weekly meetings with John Mattill, former editor of Technology Review, during the spring of 1984, while much of the experience was still fresh in my memory. In the summer of 1989 it went under contract with Dutton, and it was first published in the fall of 1991.

  The events occurred nearly 20 years ago, but whenever I read an article in the newspaper about MIT, I say to myself "that's in my book." I encountered and wrote about binge drinking, the lack of sufficient dorm space for freshmen, the poor treatment of women, suicide. The Institute has tried to correct these problems. And it may have been successful in some of its efforts.

  When I gave a talk to a class of MIT undergrads in the spring of 1996, many of them said that they didn't think the experience was as hard as I had described in the book. Which may mean that the Institute has changed somewhat because of the book.

  But as one of this book's characters says, "MIT is a dragon I have to slay." Ten thousand of the smartest, hardest-working people in the world are placed together within the several hundred acres of the MIT campus
, and they are driven by 1,000 even smarter professors. The touchy-feely soft stuff of making the Institute a kinder gentler place will of necessity always take a back seat to the real business of inventing, discovering, and becoming highly skilled.

  I lost a friend to suicide at MIT. I mock the over-techie attitude toward such calamities, when my first thought is the fluid mechanics of the decease. Yet MIT's magazine of innovation writes, "take a fair, statistical look at these numbers [recent suicide data]" and you find that it's just a random fluctuation, like a baseball batter's slump or streak. Tell that to the parents, the brothers, the sisters, the boyfriends, the girlfriends, the husbands, the wives, the roommates, the hallmates. Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist whom I met on an airplane and who was at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, said that the weapons scientists, on hearing the news, immediately pulled out their calculators and busied themselves with estimating the explosive energy of the bomb.

  There is another theme of the book: surviving failure. Many of the Institute's ten thousand students fail on a regular basis. An undergraduate flunks out, or doesn't have the grades to be admitted to graduate school. A graduate student doesn't complete his or her degree. A newly minted Ph.D. doesn't get the postdoc or assistant professorship. The assistant professor is not promoted. MIT and other places like it have to maintain their standards, but how can they be more humane while doing that?

  Several years ago I met a kid who had just been kicked out of the mathematics graduate program. He was crushed; he had no degree at all. He and others at MIT may spend a lot of their lives wasting time thinking they're just not good enough, when Tufts would probably make them deans. Where's the grief counseling for these people? As Martha, Charlie Croker's cast-off wife in A Man in Full says, "you become invisible."

  If you the reader are in a crisis at MIT or a similar place, consider the option of taking time off, transferring to another school, working at a grocery store for a while, whatever. Things will get better. During my 20th reunion at Johns Hopkins, I spoke with a classmate from freshman year who transferred to a slightly less prestigious school for his sophomore, junior, and senior years. I've never found out what the circumstances of that transfer were, but he is now enjoying a wonderful career.

  There is no shame in not summitting Mount Everest during an ice storm.

  A few notes about the book itself. It is primarily nonfiction, since most of what happens in it is based on my best recollections of experiences I had as a graduate student at MIT. However, I was not wired for sound and I did not take photographs of all the locations described herein. Thus for example the journal articles described in piles on Professor Mikic's chairs may have been, in fact, on Professor Rohsenow's chairs or on someone else's chairs.

  Names of key MIT professors have been retained, both to give due credit to the work they presented in the lectures I attended, and to present real people in the real Institute. Dialogue or lecture material for these characters is often included in quotation marks. However, the book was written eight years after the fact, and the words I present are based on my memory and/or notes I took at the time. If my memory is at fault, I apologize. Those people whose real names are used are included in the book's index.

  All other characters are composites; the names and physical characteristics have been changed, and a few of the scenes with these characters are purely fictitious. However, even the fictitious scenes are based on real experiences.

  Chapter 21 is new to this edition. All other text is exactly as it appeared in the original edition, with a few corrections. The main text includes the general sense of the technical problems to be solved and my approaches to them; the Chapter Notes include more discussion of the technical material.

  The book's title came to me when I saw a print of what MIT looked like in the 1950s. The view was looking north, past Building 20 and the swimming pool. In the background were several red brick factory buildings. The title of the print was "MIT and Factories," and it was produced by Fred Roseberry, an MIT technician. "That's it," I thought. MIT is a factory, a factory for ideas, an idea factory.

  The review of this book in The Thistle, MIT's alternative student newspaper, noted that the term "idea factory" had been coined after World War II. It was what the postwar research university should be: a university with affiliated industry nearby. As in Stanford and Silicon Valley. Or MIT and Kendall Square/Route 128.

  I'm glad I went to MIT. The rigor I learned there has served me well. I spent some time in the company of greatness. And MIT really did make me smarter-which means that anyone can become smarter, by learning to think.

  MIT is a different place for everyone who goes there. But there exist invariants, and I hope I've hit on more than a few in what follows.

  Prologue

  Belgium

  Saturday, May 9, 1981

  The letter was getting wet and wrinkled in my pocket. I was thinking.

  Leave Stephanie; go to MIT. Marry Stephanie; stay in Belgium. Put ocean between me and Stephanie; go to MIT. Marry Stephanie later; go to MIT.

  "Dear Mr. White," the letter said. "We have not yet heard from you and would like to know if we should reserve a place for you in next fall's group for the Technology and Policy Program. Please let us know your decision at your earliest convenience."

  This was their first letter and it didn't make sense. When you're accepted, you usually get a fat package with forms for housing and insurance. And funding.

  Pop question tonight; call MIT Monday.

  The peasants had had enough in 1794 and, during the French Revolution, they burned the abbey, all except the chimney and the columns now dormant amidst the trees. Peeled open, the chimney converged, the moss-covered gray stone narrowing gently upward.

  It looked like a wind-tunnel stood on its end, like the wind tunnels at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, the NATO center just south of Brussels where I'd been studying for the previous eight months. I wondered which monk had come up with the idea that the chimney's draft would be improved by the convergence.

  The abbey, named Villers-la-Ville (five kilometers south of Genappe [twelve kilometers south of Waterloo (fourteen kilometers south of Brussels)]), dated from the twelfth century. The guide passed the chimney and pointed to the rectangular stone passage in the wall of the ruined refectory. "And what," he asked in French, "do you think this was for?"

  I answered, "To heat the room with the smoke before it went to the chimney."

  "Ah, oui, eh," he replied, "Monsieur must be un ingenieur."

  Stephanie sat across from me that night in the Robin Hood Restaurant near Brussels's Place Louise.

  "Oh," she said when I told her MIT had accepted me, "I'm very happy for you." But the look in her childlike brown eyes was sad, sad the same way that had made me fall in love with her when John Lennon died.

  I couldn't break her heart.

  "Is it that you would like me to marry?" I asked her in French.

  She said, "That's 'Would you like to marry yourself with me?' " I helped her with her English; she helped me with my French.

  "OK. Would you like to marry yourself with me?"

  "Oui."

  Oh mon Dieu, qu'est ce que j'ai fait?

  Monday, May 11

  "Hold the line please," the international operator said.

  "Hello, TPP," said the woman's cheery voice from 4,000 miles away.

  "Uh, yeah," I said. "This is Pepper White calling about the letter you sent me."

  "Oh, gee," she said. "I don't know how to tell you this, but we made a big mistake here. Your file was put in the deferred acceptances filing cabinet by mistake, and it was supposed to be put in the deferred applications file. So you're not really admitted."

  "Does that mean I'm rejected?"

  "No, it means your file isn't complete. You need two more letters of recommendation."

  "I'll see what I can do."

  Brussels Airport

  August 2
9, 1981

  "I love you, too.... Be sure to write.... I'll see you at Christmas. ... I'll miss you...."

  Above Cape Cod, Same Day

  The pilot started the descent too late. Steeply downward the plane dropped.

  I wanted to break into the cockpit, wake up the pilot, and say, "Pull back on the stick, you idiot; pull back on the stick!"

  C H A P T E R

  1

  Logging On

  Monday, August 31, 1981

  I climbed the stairs from the Kendall Square subway stop, rounded the corner onto Ames Street, and began to feel the knot being tied in my stomach. Maybe I should have stayed in Belgium after all. The street was bounded by an old gray factory on the right and a drably functional red brick building on the left. The factory windows were half-open, and compressed air hissed and machines loudly punched holes in metal.

  I remembered Mr. Hume and Mr. Ide in the physics movies from MIT that Mrs. DaRosa had shown my high school class. She had refused to write me a recommendation to MIT for college on the grounds that it wasn't human. Wait, she said, and go to a nice liberal arts school for college. Work hard, get good grades, and if you still want to, go to MIT for graduate school.

  I went to Johns Hopkins. There, as I majored in environmental engineering, I studied art history, French, Italian, American cinema. I went on the Grand Tour. First six months in Milan and the environs, then my year at the von Karman Institute. I felt rested, as if the broadening chapter of my life had been completed. Now it was time to focus and to work.

  I turned right after the factory and went between it and the not-quite-as-drab beige concrete and glass building that came to a point. Farther along were the Bauhaus-style box of a swimming pool and temporary World War II buildings. I felt claustrophobic and yet protected. The windows at the Belgian monastery had faced inward also. The monastery had provided time and space for quiet reflection by a devotedly trained elite. I would become one of that present elite: a member of the intelligentsia.