The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  "Yeah, that sounds great. I played a little bit in Europe. Sounds like a good way to meet some people, too. Maybe get some funding. Do you have an R.A.?"

  "I'm working on outgassing of fluorocarbons for foam refrigerator insulation for Glicksman. He just hired me about a week ago. How about you?"

  "I'm glad that at least that research assistantship went to a nice guy. He turned me down for it. I'm still looking. If you hear of anything, maybe you can let me know. What are you doing for lunch?" I asked.

  "I'm going up to Harvard Square to meet my wife, Claudia. Maybe the three of us can get together some time."

  Gee, this guy's got it all. R.A., brains, wife Claudia. He probably even has an apartment with a level floor. Which reminds me I should give Stephanie a call. But first lunch at Walker.

  It's not fun to eat by yourself, but it's tolerable if you have the notes from your classes to look over. It seemed like about half the tables were occupied by parties of one, so it didn't bother me so much to be alone. Besides, there would be soccer and company that evening.

  I spent the next half hour sick in the men's room. It's tolerable if you have the notes from your classes to look over. What is it? I wondered. Am I stressed out already? I should really be at my desk copying over these notes. What's the story here? I've got to get going.

  It took three hours to copy over the notes from Shapiro's class. It was painstaking, but his words were fresh and I wrote every one I could remember. It was as if I'd met Moses and he'd dictated the Ten Commandments. It was also something I knew I could do. The problems that he'd handed out were another story. I dared not crack the packet until I'd finished the transcribing job. Complete one task at a time, the easiest ones first.

  The train was leaving the station. It was going slowly but would soon pick up speed. Now I could walk or trot beside it, but sooner or later I would have to get on board or I would lose it.

  Soccer was a welcome relief. I'd bumped into and recruited Michael Picardi; he wanted to play goalie. I had a decent shot with my left foot, so I volunteered to play left wing.

  The soccer team was from the Heat Transfer Lab, hence the name Caloric, after the archaic caloric theory of heat transmission. Carlos Lopez (thesis topic: steam flow in piping in nuclear power plants) from Mexico would play left halfback. Dave Orlowski (thesis topic: computer simulation of heat conduction in semiconductor crystal growth) was the coach and center forward; he was about to finish his Ph.D. Hamid Reza worked on quantum thermodynamics for Gyftopoulos and played right fullback. Robin Thomas was another theoretical computer type. Ted Bain was from England and was working for Gemayel on boiling in a moving fluid. Norm Jason had an R.A. in fluidized bed coal combustion and was patenting the safety ladder he'd designed for his senior project at Michigan. I felt like I'd joined an instant fraternity. They were friendly and smart, and they accepted me.

  The institute looks lovely from the playing fields in the afternoon sun. The two domes line up beside each other with the highrise Green Building behind them both in the distance-a dense pack of knowledge.

  It felt like fall. It felt like high school. It felt like things were going to be all right when I played soccer.

  I called Stephanie.

  »Allo,« she said.

  "Salut, cherie, it's moi, Pepper."

  Oh, Peppeur, how are yoouu? «

  "Fine, thanks, but things are becoming hectic. Say listen, Stephanie, I've been meaning to ..."

  »I juste sent you a care package. Some Godiva chocolates and some biscuits from the Italian bakery we go to. «

  "Oh, wow. Thanks. Say, I ... uh."

  »Je t'aime, Peppeur.«

  "I love you, too."

  Back to Building 20. I had my TPP desk for at least a few more days, plus the key to the office and therefore access to the couch for staying over nights. Gyftopoulos's lecture notes took only two hours to copy, including my break to get cheese and peanut butter crackers and a cup of tea with extra cream and extra sugar from the vending machine down the hall. That left some time to crack into the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on thermodynamics.

  It started with Galileo and the first thermometer that he invented. Gee, those Renaissance guys did everything. Then in the Age of Reason, Black invented the caloric theory after which my soccer team was named, and finally Monsieur Carnot came along and invented the theory for the steam engine that James Watt invented. Then Clausius perfected the concept of entropy, although he never really defined it. It made interesting reading but it wouldn't help on the problem set.

  Ah yes, the problem set. No time like the present to get started. It was neatly typed. Problem 1 looked like a piece of cake. "A room contains 10 barrels of oil and adequate air for the complete combustion of the oil. Upon burning, this oil can transfer a maximum of 6 million btu/barrel to systems in the environment. a. If the combustion occurs without any energy transfer to the environment, what is the change in total mass of the contents of the room?"

  Piece of cake. The room is closed, I guess, like a closed system, so there won't be any change in mass. I mean where's it going to come from? Or go to?

  Next part of question a. "What is the change in mass between the oil-air mixture and the products of combustion if the maximum energy is transferred to the environment?"

  Answer: Same thing. What difference does it make? Mass is still conserved.

  "b. If a uranium 235 fission can yield a transferrable energy of 200 million electron-volts per fission, how many grams of U-235 are the energy equivalent of 10 barrels of oil?"

  Say what? He didn't say anything about U-235 in the lecture. What business does he have pulling that out on the problem set? Then I remembered that he was also a nuclear engineering professor, and the class was also a nuclear engineering class. And I remembered that this was MIT. The point of this problem must be to show us what a piddly amount of uranium takes the place of a huge amount of oil. This is basically an exercise in converting the energy values from electron-volts, what physicists measure energy in, to British thermal units (Btus), what engineers measure energy in.

  I cranked through the conversion factors and it came out to just less than a gram, or close to the weight of several grains of salt. Nuclear power. Safe, clean, reliable.

  Problem 2 looked a little harder and it was already 10:30 so I hopped on my bike for home, a four-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a sagging triple-decker in Allston. You could skateboard down the hallway from the front to the back without pushing, but at $80 a month the price was right. My bed was a mattress that Jim Stuart and I had roped onto his old Impala and had driven from the used furniture store in Somerville. The flowery little table lamp was the cheapest one at the MIT furniture exchange. I hoped my standard of living was bottoming out.

  I stopped in at the neighborhood Seven-Eleven for a latenight snack of a honey bun and a pint of chocolate milk. Highly caloric, but I'd earned it with my labors of the day. My reflection stared back from the glass on the inside of the Seven-Eleven door; its hair was standing straight up from running my hand through it doing my work, and it looked tired. I wondered whether I'd go bald.

  At the kitchen table my roommate's cat purred against my ankle.

  "Get away from me, cat. I don't want to be bothered now," I said softly so as not to wake anyone. "I just want to read the funnies in my Globe here and enjoy my honey bun and chocolate milk." I nudged the cat away but it came back.

  "Purrrpurrr," it said, nestling on the front of my shin.

  "I'm warning you. You want to take a ride, you're going to take a ride."

  "Purrrrpurrrr."

  "How can I pay attention to the Wizard of Id with you there?"

  I lofted the cat gently, a couple of feet-well, maybe moreso it slid on its claws on the gray linoleum floor another couple of inches after landing. It came back again, so I guess I didn't hurt it.

  "Purrpurrrr."

  Friday, September 11

  There were only twenty students in Rohsenow's
class. Some were in their thirties, special students coming in from General Electric in Lynn to get their master's degrees part-time. A couple were in the navy, in the master's program that they follow; the intent is to give them some mental firepower to deal with the defense industry consultants, who have high-powered degrees from places like MIT. The rest were in their mid-twenties like me.

  Two fifty-five. Advanced Heat Transfer. I'd done a background check on Rohsenow in the library and found that he had founded and owned Dynatech, an R&D firm in Cambridge. Dynatech employed about 950 employees and had annual sales of $51 million. Rohsenow was in his sixties now and had received his Ph.D. at Yale just after the war. His specialty was the science of boiling water. If you know what causes boiling, you can figure out how big to make the tubes the water goes through in your nuclear power plant. The more you know about the boiling, the smaller you can make the tubes and still sleep at night. If the tubes are smaller, the power plant is less expensive, and therefore viable.

  Rohsenow wore a light blue tweed jacket, darker blue doubleknit slacks, white shirt, and blue tie. He was bald with a little brown hair around the edges and wore glasses that seemed not quite strong enough; before he started the class, he tilted them forward and squinted to see the clock at the back of the room.

  "Well, I guess it's time to get started," he said, setting his pipe on the table by his notes. "First I'd like to go over some housekeeping details. We've put together a package of problems for you to do. We don't grade them because we'd rather have that time available for you to ask questions." (Or for your lucrative consulting jobs, I thought.) "The solutions for each problem will be posted on the board outside the classroom, so you can go there and check your own work. Jamie Mohammed here will be the teaching assistant; once a week he'll conduct a tutorial where you can ask him questions about the assignments."

  "Oh, and about grades," he continued. "Jamie and I get together at the end of the term and we discuss whether or not you have a nice personality. If you do we give you an A."

  There was nervous laughter. He spoke slowly, deliberately, with a soft, deep voice and pauses at the punch lines.

  "Actually, we give two quizzes, each an hour long, and a final quiz, three hours long. If you do better on the hour quizzes, we weight them more heavily. If you do better on the final, we say, 'Hooray, he finally got it,' and we weight it more heavily. If you don't do well on either, well, there's always business school."

  More nervous laughter.

  "Now about the course material for the day." He picked up his pipe and tried to light it.

  "There's a couple of ways to do any problem. You can do it the fast way, and get an answer that's accurate within 20 percent, or you can do it by computer, take two weeks setting it up, and get an answer that's accurate within 2 percent."

  "Now you guys," accent on the you, pause, "want to be the boss. I'll show you the fast way. You'll do that in five minutes, and then pull it out of your sleeve when your assistant comes to ask you a question. You'll look at the graph he came up with and say to him, 'It should go this way, not that way,' and he'll think you're smart.... Reminds me of a story. Rickover told it to me. You know, Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy. He had this young guy working for him. The kid was all brighteyed and bushy-tailed, straight out of Annapolis. Rickover gets him to design this heat exchanger to heat water with exhaust from the ship's smokestack. Since I'd taught it to him, Hyman had the trick I'm about to show you up his sleeve. He knew the heat exchanger should be about, say, as big as this room."

  Rohsenow puffed on his pipe a couple of times and waved his arm around to indicate the size of the room.

  "So the kid goes off with his computer and comes back a week later and tells Rickover the heat exchanger should be about as big as the whole ship. Ha ha ha," he chortled.

  The kid's an admiral himself now. But don't worry; I taught him the trick, too."

  That night I plowed through some more thermo homework, alone in the TPP office. This isn't like what I'd read and heard about business or law school, I thought. We're all taking our individual courses, mostly on our own. We have to learn by searching our own knowledge, by reasoning, by looking things up in books.

  At 11:30 I looked out the window at the plume from the power plant's smokestack. The stack converged gently upward. The plume bent over slightly and made a billowing white-orange arc across the high-crime-lit sky of East Cambridge. I wanted to know everything about that arc, how to make less of it.

  I unrolled the olive drab sleeping bag onto the office couch, grabbed a chair cushion for a pillow, and tuned to the Latin music on WBUR on the clock radio. A train of oil tank cars pulled by a diesel locomotive rolled by slowly, close enough to shake the building; the Main Street grade crossing bell ding ding dinged. The train stopped at the power plant.

  I wondered how Stephanie was.

  C H A P T E R

  3

  Break

  Tuesday 10/6/81

  Dear Ma + Pa,

  Sorry for not writing for so long. I'm writing now very fast. Classes continue to move at fast pace. First test a week from Friday. I talked to my heat transfer prof for two hours on friday got some good Ideas by asking him lots of specific questions on lecture mat'l ... including a few he didn't know how to answer. I also brought to his attention a typo that had been in his book for twenty years.

  I sold my track bike for $180 so now I definitely can make it through this term sans probleme. We played soccer again, winning 1-0. Lots of fun; I feel like I'm getting into reasonable shape.

  Routine is now get up at 6:30, ride in along Charles River to MIT, great sunrises now, see crews rowing up the Chas. at that hour. Nice view of downtown Boston, with sun coming through buildings, light very orange in distance. Then read then big breakfast at dining hall. Then study or write letters (this is about the first time). Then classes then study. I leave at about 10:00 P.m. after lunch in dining hall. Dinner = vending machines in Building. Learning very much, striving to master concepts.

  One prof has consulting firm in energy conservation so maybe job possibility in offing.

  Gotta go.

  Love, Pepper

  TPP Office. 8:00 A. M.

  Saturday, September 12

  Thermo, Problem 3

  "An important task in everyday life is the pumping of water from underground wells. Among other methods, this can be carried out either by human effort or by a machine. We wish to compare the energy costs of these two methods of pumping 10,000 gallons from a depth of 300 feet. Assume that a person is fed with eggs.

  "An egg provides 80 kilogram-calories (kcal) (a.k.a. calories to the layperson) of energy and costs about $1.20 per dozen. The human body transforms caloric food into muscle power with an efficiency of about 25 percent, by using a pedal-powered apparatus similar to a stationary bicycle.

  "A gasoline engine transforms fuel into motive power with an efficiency of about 25 percent. Gasoline can make available about 20,000 Btu/pound-mass and is priced at about $3.00 per gallon (in most places except the United States).

  "a. Find the energy cost of each of these two methods of pumping the water."

  Answer. This is still right out of high school. If they stay like this I'll have no problems. Just calculate the amount of energy required to raise the 10,000 gallons of water the 300 feet. Then figure out the number of eggs required, taking into account the energy content of each egg and the efficiency of egg conversion. (405 eggs.) Ditto for the gasoline. (1.10 gallons.) I'd rather eat four hundred eggs than drink a gallon of gasoline.

  "b. By considering other foodstuffs and including in your approximate calculations both capital and labor costs, which of the two ways of pumping water would you recommend? Express your considerations and recommendations in a paragraph or so."

  This again is easy, I thought. Figure about 50 hours for the quarter-horsepower person; at $4 an hour that's about $200 for the person. Add to that the $40 or so for the eggs, and you have $
240. I'll figure the bicycle apparatus and the engine would cost about the same. Then it comes to about 73 times as expensive for the human as for the pump.

  Halfway through Problem 4 Michael Picardi came into the office. "Do you want to go see the 'Sky Art' exhibit?" he asked.

  "Sure. What's the 'Sky Art' exhibit?" I answered.

  "They're displaying various airborne sculptures in the quadrangle by the student center. Various artists from around New England are exhibiting their work. If we go now, we can catch the launch of the 'Sky Jellyfish.' "

  "Sounds interesting. Let's go," I said.

  The artist prepared the sky-jellyfish for launch. He enlisted Michael, me, and five others to hold onto the ends of the skytentacles, while he inflated the bowl-shaped body with helium. The thing expanded to about the size of a backyard swimming pool in Levittown. It was all made of silver and red Mylar, the tough plastic they wrap satellites with.

  "Can you believe they call this art?" I said to Michael.

  "Pay attention," Michael said. "It's almost time for launch."

  The artist said, "Now I'm going to finish inflating this and then we'll have the countdown from five. When we get to zero, everyone let go of what they're holding."

  "Five, four, three, two, one," we all chanted in unison.

  "Lift-off," said the guy wearing the NASA T-shirt.

  At T plus 15 seconds I said to Michael, "I'll be doggoned. It does look like a jellyfish. Just look at the way the tentacles and the body are floating and oscillating. The guy must have calculated all that stuff, the thickness of the Mylar, the mixture of helium and air in the body, the length and width of the tentacles."

  "Yeah, either that or he's lucky. Let's just hope all that Mylar doesn't bring down a 'sky-jumbo-jet,' " Michael said. "Say, are you hungry? Would you like to join me for a falafel?"