The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  "Did you get A's in those classes?" he asked directly.

  "Yes, I did. I'd really like to take your class. I'm especially interested in the energy conservation aspects of thermodynamics."

  "Do you have any background in energy conservation?"

  "I did an energy conservation study of a factory while I was in Italy. I found that if they would pay a guy to go around and fix the leaks in the compressed air system they could save $25,000 per year."

  "That's very interesting," he answered, "and it's good that you noted that they would have to pay the guy to achieve the savings. There is always a trade-off of capital, labor, and energy. You're welcome to register for the course. I shall look forward to seeing you at the first lecture."

  It felt good to have his approval.

  "Thank you, sir. Is there any book I can read to get a head start on the material?"

  "No, it's best that you wait until the first class. We will be handing out course notes then. Gian Paolo Beretta and I are working on a text that we believe will not make the mistakes that are commonly found in thermodynamics texts. If you read any other material perhaps it might confuse you."

  Friday the TPP orientation meeting was in the Miller Room, the lounge on the second floor of Building 1. I finally met all the other students in one place. They were all bright enough, but most seemed to lack the focus and direction I expected of people at MIT. Some had survived a year or more, though, and I hungered for their confidence.

  One of the other rookies was Michael Picardi, who'd just earned his physics degree from Williams College the previous May. His senior thesis was on "Relativistic Effects in Black Holes."

  "Why aren't you going to physics graduate school?" I asked him.

  "Because I'm not a Korean genius and I want to have a life," he said. "I agonized over it a while, but sometimes you just have to go with your gut. I'm going to do mechanical engineering and energy conservation. It seems a little nearer-term than physics. Fusion isn't going to be feasible for forty years at best, and I want to do something useful now."

  "Gee, you sound just like me," I said. "Only I bailed out of physics in my junior year at Hopkins. I still remember the problem. 'Find the electrostatic potential at the geometric center of an infinitely long cylinder of uniform charge.' Then I took up fluid mechanics as sort of a compromise. At least you can see the fluids. How can you see an electric field?"

  "I know what you mean," he said. "Maybe we'll take some classes together."

  Pyndike's office

  Tuesday, September 8

  "You're in that TPP program, aren't you? You must be more interested in a topic dealing more with technology. I'm really looking for someone with a more straight economics and policy slant."

  That afternoon in Glicksman's office. "You're in that TPP program, right? You must be more interested in a topic dealing more with policy and that kind of stuff. I'm really looking for someone with a straight mechanical direction."

  Wednesday, I met with my TPP adviser, David Marks. A civil engineering professor, he figured out how to manage water flows in river basins with several dams as his specialty. Jerry Cohon, my freshman faculty adviser at Hopkins, had been Marks's first Ph.D. student.

  "What I want out of TPP is a sound engineering background and some economics so I can figure out cost-effectiveness of energy conservation programs," I said.

  You should get out of TPP then. Go straight to Course 2get your degree in mechanical engineering. You seem to know what you want out of this place. We try to let talented people who know what they want achieve it here; we try to stay out of their way. But if you're at all uncertain, you'll be in for a rough time. By the way, you'll know we've got you when you call the men's room by its number."

  The last hoop of my transition from TPP to real mechanical engineering was the meeting with Warren Rohsenow, graduate adviser for mechanical engineering students. I still didn't know the full circumstances of how I was admitted, and I was a little scared that trying to leave TPP would uncover the error they may have made in letting me in.

  Rohsenow, leaning back in his chair and cleaning his pipe, looked through my file and said matter-of-factly, "You're already in this department."

  Phew.

  Now the bad news. Rohsenow continued: "The hooker is, since you didn't take mechanical engineering in college, you'll have to take all the department's undergraduate core courses: twooh-one Statics, two-oh-two System Dynamics and Controls, twoninety-four Dynamics, two-thirty-one Strength of Materials, and two seventy Design. That's the deal; take it or leave it."

  My term of indentured servitude had just doubled. "I'd still like to start with the graduate courses in my strong areas," I said. "I think it'll help me find funding."

  "Well." Puff puff. "It sounds kind of bass ackwards if you ask me but it's your decision. You need six graduate courses for your master's so it'll be good to get three of them out of the way."

  "Thank you for your signature," I said. "It looks like you'll be teaching heat transfer, so I guess I'll see you in class."

  "Right. See you in class."

  C H A P T E R

  2

  Class

  Thursday, September 10, 1981

  9:23 A.M. Room 3-214, on the second floor at the end of the hall, on the corner of the building with a view of the river. A hint of fall was in the air. The 100 hard wooden movie theatre chairs on the level floor of the 30-by-40-foot classroom each had a little desk surface that swung up from the arm of the chair. I picked one on the second row just left of center. Close enough to see the blackboard, far enough not to get called on first if that's what they do here.

  Professor Ascher Shapiro arranged his notes for two twentyfive, Advanced Fluid Mechanics, on the table on the slightly elevated wooden platform in front of the three blackboards. He looked close to retirement age, with longish gray hair around the sides of the bald spot. He wore light brown corduroys, a green turtleneck, and small silver-rimmed half-spectacles that he looked through only when looking down at his notes.

  The hundred or so desks filled around me as 9:30 approached. My fellow students were in their mid- to late twenties. Many Americans, but at least a third were foreigners. Greeks, Koreans, Iranians, Indians, French, Chinese conversed in their native tongues. There were about five women.

  At 9:28 Shapiro began drawing diagrams, and at 9:30 he quietly said, "I'd like to begin now." He had a slight New York accent. Thirty seconds later all the conversations had stopped.

  "Before we get started, I'd like to go over some housekeeping details for the class. There will be two quizzes during the term and a final exam. At the end of class we will be handing out a set of problems for you to work on during the term. These will not be for handing in or count toward your grade. However, we strongly recommend that you do them. It is essential for your mastery of the material that you do problems. And by doing problems, I don't mean mimicking a worked-out solution from a handbook-I mean that you need to pioneer your way through the solution yourself; blaze your own trail, find the dead ends, backtrack, and move on. There will be two tutorial sessions every Friday. You can come to these to ask Professor Gemayel for help finding solutions. Also, we want to encourage you to take good notes from the lectures. At the end of the term you will have the option of submitting your lecture notebook. If it is well done and you are on the borderline between one grade and another, you will receive the higher grade."

  I guess we're big boys and girls now and don't get forced into doing homework. I'll write fast, though, and copy over my notes after every class. The brownie points might come in handy.

  "Now for the lecture," Shapiro continued. "Fluid mechanics is a branch of mechanics. Mechanics may be defined as the study of motions, forces, and bodies, and the relationships between the motions of bodies that are brought about by forces. The subject of fluid mechanics is very broad, including hydraulics, plasmas such as those in a hydrogen fusion reactor, gas dynamics, physical oceanography, magnetohydrodyna
mics, and fluid control systems. This particular course is advanced, approaching the fundamentals with what is hoped to be a greater degree of insight and sophistication than you may have experienced before."

  He spoke as one having authority. The twenty-seven times he must have presented the identical lecture since the early 1950s had polished the presentation style, cut it down to a flawless gem of wisdom. I wrote, scribbled as fast as I could, briefly wishing that I knew how to take shorthand; I didn't want to miss a facet.

  Shapiro explained density. He started by drawing little chunks of fluid. They were little circles on the blackboard, with a little line from the center to the edge of each circle. "We have a continuum model; that is, we model the effects of the molecular motion as an average instead of looking at each molecule. The continuum is a total fiction which attempts to model the real. The connection between the continuum and the real is that the continuum properties should represent appropriate averages of the real material. With density, we assign density values to a point. We give density a value at each point in our continuum field as a function of space and time. This is the giant intellectual leap made by ..."

  I didn't catch the name. I'll raise my hand and ask. No, I'll leave a blank in my notes and ask later. It would be nice if I knew what he meant by a model.

  His lecture brought me back to my physics days. I had sort of wimped out on physics, and here the same kind of abstract concepts that applied to fluids were coming back to haunt me. But I enjoy fluids. If you understand them, you can have an idea why a tornado does what it does, why the wind blows from the ocean in the day and to the ocean at night. I'll be able to see more than clouds in my coffee.

  He elegantly continued, covering fluid statics-what happens when the fluid is standing still. This is what civil engineers worry about when they build dams. The deeper the water, the higher the pressure. The higher the pressure, the bigger the force on the dam. The bigger the force, the thicker the concrete. Otherwise the water pressure would cause the dam to burst. There were no questions from the students, only rapt attention and fast writing. When the bell rang just before 11:00, I had filled eighteen sheets of paper with notes. It felt like an information overload, but at least I had until Tuesday to digest the material before the next lecture.

  Shapiro finished by saying, "I want to reiterate the importance of doing problems. Through working problems on your own, you will find that there is an enormous difference between learning and being taught. Professor Gemayel will be handing out the problem packets." The one hundred of us went to the front, crowding around like options traders in a pit as Gemayel handed out the half-inch-thick packets.

  While I waited my turn I saw near the door a guy who looked familiar. "Excuse me," I said. "Did you go to Johns Hopkins?"

  "Yeah, but I transfered to MIT for my junior and senior years. My name's Matt Armstrong."

  I remembered the acute questions he had asked in physics class freshman year. Matt had been a "Simpy" (for SMPY, Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth); in seventh grade he took the SAT math test and scored 700 on it, the highest of any seventh grader in Baltimore. That score qualified him to study math at the college level through high school. I had the feeling Matt might be on the other side of the bell curve from me in this class. Math talent notwithstanding, he was a nice guy. In the fall of 1975 he had had shoulder-length hair, but it was short now.

  "What have you been doing since you graduated?" I asked as we walked down the hall toward the infinite corridor.

  "I worked the past two years out at a high-tech company on Route 128, developing a high-efficiency water heater. I should be getting a patent on it soon. In fact, I have to go out there this afternoon to sign some papers."

  Patent. This guy has a patent.

  He asked, "Do you have a class now?"

  "Yeah. Two four five one."

  "Hey, that's great. I'm taking two four five one, too. Maybe we can find a couple of seats together."

  On the infinite corridor the air was more electric, the walking pace slightly faster than it had been before classes started. Still no eye contact. I had the feeling these people didn't waste time.

  Gyftopoulos's lecture hall had the same movie chair desks, only the rows went up as you went back in the room. Matt and I found two in the fourth row.

  A lot of the students were the same ones as in Fluids. Maybe there were a few more Americans in this class. Again, mostly men, with four or five women. There weren't many particularly goodlooking people of either gender, but there was a universal look of embattled concentration in the eyes. A lot of the guys looked like they only shaved every other day.

  Gyftopoulos chatted at the front of the class with a guy about my age who had a light brown mustache and a small beard on his chin alone. All the younger guy needed was a monocle and the right clothes and he could have been in a "Spy" cartoon. A couple of minutes after 11:00 Gyftopoulos called the class to order. He smiled and nodded my way when he saw me in the fourth row.

  "First I want to go over a few housekeeping details," he said. "Homework will be assigned every week, due at the lecture the following week. Also there will be one or two two-hour quizzes during the term, plus a final examination. Your grade will be based 30 percent on homework, 30 percent on quizzes, and 40 percent on the final examination."

  It was nice how both he and Shapiro called the two-hour tests quizzes. Perhaps it was institute policy to mellow-speak them down from midterm examination or test; a quiz is what you take for ten minutes in high school. At least I was comforted by the grading and counting of the problem sets. I figured if I could just hang in with those, I should be able to do respectably in the class.

  Gyftopoulos continued, "Gian Paolo Beretta will be helping me teach the class; he will also be available to assist you with any questions you may have. And of course you are always welcome to come to my office to ask questions."

  Beretta must be brilliant, I thought. If he's teaching he must already have his Ph.D., which isn't bad for a twenty-four-yearold.

  "Since there are no texts available that teach what we shall be presenting here, you will be required to purchase a set of class notes that Gian Paolo and I have put together. Please remain seated while we count the number of sets to reproduce."

  Gian Paolo started counting, as did I. Matt looked up and down, to the left and the right, and by the time Gian Paolo was on the second row Matt said out loud, "Seventy-six."

  "Good. Thank you," Gyftopoulos said, not questioning the number that Matt had stated with such conviction.

  I asked Matt quietly, "How'd you count so fast?"

  "Each row has 14 chairs. There are 6 rows-that's 84-and there're 8 empty seats. That's 76."

  Well, I guess we know who's going to get an A in this class.

  Again Gyftopoulos: "I want you to feel free to ask any questions during the lecture also. I will not be calling on students as a regular practice, but I may from time to time ask someone to help with a derivation."

  Not quite as bad as the Socratic method, but I should keep up with the reading and problem sets here. Usually engineering classes are one-way data transfer; you try to keep up with the lecture's logic flow, but only the professor has to think fast when questioned. But Gyftopoulos would challenge us, and maybe challenge me.

  "Now for the lecture," Gyftopoulos went on. "The course title again is 'General Thermodynamics.' General refers to several as pects of the approach to the course. First of all, the exposition is of an approach that is valid for all systems, regardless of their size. Second, the results will be valid for all states and conditions of our systems. Third, the approach suggests that thermodynamics is not a closed field, but rather includes many areas that are open for discussion and new analysis. Thermodynamics in the title refers to a study of the properties of matter and the changes in properties of matter which occur; thus the interactions of different parts of matter. The science of thermodynamics is more general than mechanics in that it can describe hot and
cold bodies, an area that the science of mechanics is incapable of describing. In addition, mechanics cannot deal with the concept of entropy."

  Right. What's a state? What's a system? What is entropy? I kept writing, scribbling fast.

  "Now for some basic concepts," Gyftopoulos continued. "As in any scientific approach, we shall concentrate on a small part of the universe, a system. A system needs at least two things: (a) the amount of matter in the system-its mass-and (b) constraints or external parameters-i.e., you must define the system boundary. Now how do we analyze systems? There are two possibilities. First at one instant in time, and second as a function of time.

  "At one instant in time, the state or condition of the system is a powerful concept in analyzing the system. If you know the system and its state, you can calculate everything you want to know for the one instant of time. State is a set of numbers or parameters that allow us to calculate properties."

  Right. What's a property?

  "Second, the function-of-time analysis relies on the equation of motion to describe the transition from one state to another."

  Gyftopoulos talked in similar abstract terms for another hour. Matt listened attentively and wrote a perfectly neat set of notes while I scribbled away, following bits and pieces of the line of reasoning but wondering where this all fit into my aspiration to be an energy czar. I would copy over the notes later.

  "Thank you for your attention. Please pick up a copy of next week's problem set and the copy of an article I've written."

  The article was entitled "Thermodynamics, Principles of." It was reprinted from Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  I asked Matt as we left the classroom, "Say there, Matt, do you know of any desks anywhere? I quit the Technology and Policy Program just before classes started and they want my desk back."

  "So you punted TPP? Sounds like a good move. There's a desk in my office that's available. Why don't you talk to Charlotte Evans, the department secretary, and see if you can get a key? I'd hate to see you wandering around the institute with a shopping cart full of books. By the way, do you play soccer? We're putting a team together for intramurals. It's called the Calorics. We've got a practice tonight at 6:30."