The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  "Sure. I haven't had a falafel since I was in Istanbul two months ago."

  "You went to Istanbul? Did you see Hagia Sofia, the church dedicated to wisdom?"

  "Yes. It was beautiful."

  Michael continued, "I'll never forget the slides my Art History professor showed. 'Note how they hid the means of support of the dome,' he said. 'Note the shimmering pencils of light dancing beneath the ceiling's soaring verticality.' Did the pencils of light really shimmer?"

  "Yes, they shimmered all right. And you know the amazing thing about it? How long do you think it took to build it?"

  "Fifty years, a hundred years?"

  "Try a year and a half. They did it with the wonder material of the fifth century: brick. It was the largest church in the world when they finished it."

  The soccer game was at 8:30 Sunday morning on field C, beyond the tennis bubble. They schedule the intramural games for Sunday morning. That leaves Sunday afternoon and evening free for work.

  Intramurals are big at MIT-they're one of the few instances of group activity. Teams represent the various groups, the support structures. Some shirts had the Greek letters of fraternities embossed onto them, others the names of labs or graduate departments, and some the names of countries-Greece, Turkey, Chile, Korea, any country that's on our side and has an industrial base.

  The guys on our team who'd been at MIT for several years had faded red shirts with faded yellow Caloric written on the chest. Into the latter years, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, of their Ph.D. research, they hadn't as a rule aged as gracefully as professional athletes in their late twenties. Several had started or finished losing their hair. Over half wore glasses; potbellies were common. I wondered whether MIT would do the same to me.

  The fifteen of us stood on the sidelines of field C while the Aquanauts finished their game with the Dixie Chickens. The four intramural divisions, A-, B-, C-, and D-league, are named after the grades you get in your classes. A-league is the best, composed mostly of foreigners; B-league is foreigners plus some of the jockier frats; C is mostly lab teams and frats with lower concentrations of foreigners. D-league is for dorms.

  Our opponent was TEP, a frat from across the river. Once we started, we fought hard and passed well. TEP, as undergraduates, had not forgotten how to run. I felt in the middle of the two groups-not as vigorous as the frat boys but certainly more so than many of the Calorics.

  It was clear and windy and in the second half the wind was going our way. Robin, the left halfback, gave me a tap of a pass while I was 30 yards out from the goal and I chipped the ball with my left foot. Up, up, and away it went, the wind carrying it toward the goal, the far corner-but it hit the top of the crossbar, went past the end line, and TEP kicked a goal kick. Oh well, maybe next time.

  In the end we were still ahead by 1-0 from the goal Carlos had scored in the first half. We all put our hands in a circle and shouted together, "Rah, rah, rah, TEP!" to salute our vanquished opponents.

  Several of us picked up our bicycles and walked toward the Lobdell cafeteria for breakfast. I locked mine near the sign that read, HANDICAPPED RAMP: NO BICYCLE PARKING; there were three other bikes on the railing, so I figured it was all right. Even though it was Sunday morning I didn't want to waste time looking for another place to leave the bike.

  I said to Carlos, "That was a good shot. You seem to have played soccer before."

  "Yes, well, I played a little at university in Mexico," he said. He was husky like me and had dark hair about the length John Lennon's was in 1965.

  I asked him how long he'd been at MIT, whether he'd found funding, whether he knew any professors who had money.

  "I came here last spring," he said, "on a scholarship from the Mexican government. As long as I do well enough to stay here I have a student visa. My thesis subject is a study of erosion in steam piping by water droplets in pipe elbows. You know something? Last spring was the toughest time I've had in my life. I had a hard time believing I belonged here; I thought maybe my being admitted was a fluke. And the whole time I am thinking that everybody in my classes must be smarter than I am. If everyone is smarter than I am, that means no matter how well I do on the test, I'll be below average. If I'm below average, I'll get C's and I'll be back in Mexico City. Do you know what I'm saying?"

  "Yes, I think I know what you're saying," I answered. "Let's talk about something else."

  We joined the self-congratulation of the guys at the other end of the table, the play-by-play of the game in review. We agreed on the need to go after the ball more both on offense and on defense.

  My eyes wandered across Massachusetts Avenue to the two great domes, the trees nearing the end of their green season, and the Ionic columns of Building 7. Building 7 blocked the view of the Green Building, so I could just see the weather sphere on the roof, and the ladder with a strobe light on top. The cornice on Building 7 bore the inscription "Massachussetts Institute of Technology. William Barton Rogers, Founder." The u's looked like v's because the Romans didn't invent u's.

  I didn't know whether I could do research with my team mates, or score A's in classes we might take together, but at least in soccer, I was in the right league.

  Monday morning. The saga of the desk. Charlotte Evans was the Mechanical Engineering secretary. She was in her late thirtiesblonde, attractive, and aging gracefully, like Lauren Bacall. Her accent was from Quincy or maybe Stoneham.

  Her office was the antechamber to Rohsenow's. She knew the department and its rules as well as or better than Rohsenow or any of the other professors. It was Charlotte Evans to whom I would have to make my request for a key. She had a rubber stamp with Rohsenow's signature on it and the authority to use it for the lesser issues. It was up to her to decide what was a lesser issue, so she had almost as much power as Rohsenow himself.

  "I'm a friend of Matt Armstrong," I said, standing before the seat of judgment, "and I don't have an R.A. yet, but Matt said there's an extra desk in his office. I've just left Technology and Policy, so I'm kind of in no-man's-land in the desk department."

  "First you need this," she said briskly, pulling out a stapled set of xeroxes. "This is a list of all the ongoing research projects. You should look through the list and find out who's got the most money in the area closest to what you're interested in. These guys are always closing on deals with their industry contacts and their buddies at the Department of Defense or Energy. Sometimes they need help right away, and if you keep hounding them, eventually you'll be in the right place at the right time and you'll get funding. Also, keep an eye on the department newsletter; sometimes they post their openings there." Her confidence and strength were comforting, almost motherly.

  "Now there's something else I should tell you," she continued. "The professors here can be jerks. But remember that just because they've made it through more hoops than you have, that doesn't make them better people." She took two orange index cards out of the little green metal file box and typed my name on each; she stamped Rohsenow's signature on the bottom.

  "Fill these out with the room number and the numbers on the lock and take them to the key office on the fourth floor of Building E- 51. If anyone there or in the lab gives you any trouble, tell them to come talk to me."

  It was good to have a powerful person on my side.

  Monday afternoon I went to Allen Greene's first lecture on Energy Engineering. From its description in the catalog, this course was right on the money for what I wanted out of MIT.

  He started his lecture with an example. "Suppose that the country wants to go into gasohol, a mixture of corn-derived alcohol and gasoline, in a big way. If it did, what would be needed? You'd need fuel for the tractor to plant and harvest the corn. You'd need an investment in tractors. And you'd need an investment in refineries for the alcohol production. Each of these production factors has an internal and an external economic impact. For example, the price of other grains may go up as the fields that would have otherwise been planted with them are made unavaila
ble. That's a microeconomic phenomenon, and we can model it.

  "Similarly, we can model the processes within the various subsystems, using efficiencies of the various components and costs of those components. Heavy investments in equipment may drive up prices in certain materials. We can model that as well. Then we can take all the models that we've constructed, link them, and test them for sensitivities to various parameters. Then we as decision makers can make value assessments to determine where our research and development funding should go-we can determine what are the key rate-limiting problems."

  Right. It would really help to know what a model is.

  It was good, though, to hear such a practically oriented lecture. Greene had a sort of middlewestern down-to-earthiness about him, a real-world slant that must have been partly due to his stint as vice president for research and development at Union Carbide.

  After the lecture, I went up to the podium to ask him for advice about the class. I said, "I'm really interested in what you're teaching, but I've got three other classes this term that are a full load. What would you think of my signing up for your class, auditing the lectures, and taking an incomplete. Then I could devote all of January to doing a project for the class work."

  "That doesn't really sound honest," he answered.

  "You're welcome to audit the class, although it might be a waste of time if you're not doing the homework. Why don't you come back to my office in January, and we can talk about your doing an independent study project under my direction in the spring term."

  "That sounds good," I said. "I'll drop your class now and come back to talk to you in a few months."

  Tuesday, October 6

  I needed help on Problem 4 of Problem Set 3 in Thermo. I'd had 48 out of 60 correct on Problem Set 1 (I'd checked my answers with Matt, and he'd tipped me off to 15 points worth of errors; I made the correction during Gyftopoulos's lecture). I'd done Problem Set 2 without help from Matt and had 36 out of 50. It would be a good idea to get as close as possible to 100 percent on the problem set points since they constituted 15 percent of the grade. Each ate up about fifteen to twenty hours, but the quizzes would involve more acute time pressure and I might choke on them. The problem sets could be gift points.

  Gyftopoulos had said his office door was always open, so I decided to take him up on it. He seemed kindly, like Professor Walker at Hopkins. Professor Walker taught freshman physics and encouraged students to come to his office and ask any question they wanted to. No question was too dumb for him. I expected the same with Gyftopoulos.

  But this was graduate school. And it was MIT.

  It was quarter to four and the clouds made it seem more like dusk. It was beginning to be cold outside. His secretary knocked on the window in his door and Gyftopoulos motioned me in. He finished recording a letter to a colleague at Oxford. "And I'm looking forward to seeing you at the Nuclear Thermodynamics Conference in Marseilles in January. Sincerely, Elias."

  I sat in the teak chair in front of his teak desk. He asked, "How are you finding MIT so far, Pepper?"

  "I'm finding the work challenging, especially in your course. I'm spending a lot of time on the problem sets, fifteen or twenty hours."

  "That's good. One of the reasons I have the problem sets graded is to encourage students to work on my class more than on their others. I feel that mastery of the fundamentals of thermodynamics is essential for a good engineer. Now, what specifically can I do for you today?" he asked.

  "Well, I'm having a little trouble with the problem with the three blocks of metal at three different temperatures. This is the one where you ask that if you move heat from one to another in the most efficient way possible, what is the maximum temperature one of the blocks can reach. I don't really know where to start with this and I wondered whether you could help," I said.

  I hoped he would just give me a clue or two as to how to set up the problem. For example, he might tell me first to take the two lower-temperature blocks and cool one and heat the other, then do the same thing with the one that was first hottest and the one that I just heated up. Or there might be some other trick to the problem. I just wanted a hint.

  "It is not an easy problem," Gyftopoulos said. "In fact, my colleague, Professor Clarke at Oxford, has just submitted a paper with a solution to that problem in it to the Journal of Thermodynamics. I agree with his solution; I'm interested to see whether anyone in the class comes up with what he arrived at."

  Great, I thought. Did Professor Clarke have four other problems due the same week?

  Gyftopoulos continued, "Why don't you go to the blackboard, Pepper. I'd like to ask you a few questions. They may lead you in the right direction."

  Uh-oh. I thought the Socratic method was reserved for law school and business school. All I wanted was a hint, not an impromptu oral exam.

  As I picked up a piece of chalk from the dusty aluminum tray, he asked, "Please define for me available energy."

  Say what? That's from three weeks ago. The test isn't for three weeks. He can't expect me to have reviewed that from my notes to the second lecture. Help. Get me out of here.

  I answered, "The available energy is the energy that is .. . available to do useful work." All I remembered was that several pages of the class notes were devoted to the concept. I'd read them once and had intended to get Matt or Beretta or Gyftopoulos to explain them to me before the midterm.

  Gyftopoulos would not let up. "I need a more rigorous definition than that," he said.

  I drew an upside-down horseshoe on the board, for the capital Greek letter omega. The last letter. I tried to remember the equation with the inequality that Gyftopoulos had written on the board at the beginning of the third lecture.

  It began to come back. Omega minus omega-sub-zero is greater than or equal to T-sub-zero multiplied by S minus S-subzero.

  "What does S refer to?" he probed.

  An easy one. "Entropy."

  "Please define entropy."

  A hard one. "Entropy is well, it's, uh, well, it has to do with randomness and, uh, the system's ability to do work and sort of how hot it is."

  He wasn't smiling anymore. "You're obviously not prepared for this session," he said sternly. "I'm a very busy man, and if you are not prepared and you do not have your questions wellformulated, please do not come here again."

  Don't cry, I thought. Big boys don't cry. He'll never look at me the same if I cry. I'm so tired, though. It's getting darker outside. I'm in debt. I don't know what to do about Stephanie.

  The tears and sobs welled up from my body to my head and out my eyes, mouth, and nose.

  "If . . . if ... if." I couldn't say it.

  If I knew how to formulate the question, I could answer it without you.

  "Now, now, there's no need for that," he said a little more compassionately. "Go and wash yourself and sit down for a few minutes. Then we can go over the problem."

  I walked past Beretta and the secretary in the waiting area. I tried to avoid eye contact. They didn't seem disturbed by my red face. Maybe they'd seen scenes like this before.

  I washed the salt from my eyes and sat in one of the stalls with my blue jeans still on and the door closed. I took some deep breaths. I went back to pick up my notebook from his office.

  Gian Paolo was sitting in the other teak chair, talking to Gyftopoulos. Gian Paolo handed me a sketch of the beginning of the problem, and the two of them explained how to start.

  They shot Sadat today. As the bullets ripped apart his body he stood, as always, at attention, chest out, defiant.

  Thursday, October 8. 9:00 P.m.

  T minus sixteen hours to the first quiz in Rohsenow's class. It will be the first indicator of whether or not I belong at MIT. The way to study is to read through the notes, read through the textbook, but that is just fertilizer. The way to prepare for the test is to do problems, even though there is no graded homework.

  It would be nice if there were a solution manual to the problems, in the back of the chapte
r. Then I could try the problem, get stuck, look for a hint in the solution that someone else had worked out, get stuck again, look for another hint, and so on. That's how I'd gotten through my undergrad classes.

  Look at enough similar problems and you begin to see patterns. Know the patterns and you have something to put on the paper. Then at least you can get partial credit points, when the grader gives you 3 out of 10 for putting down a relevant formula, 3 for making an attempt at plugging the specific parameters of the problem into the formula, and 4 more points if you get ... the answer.

  Here at MIT there were fewer patterns. Every problem seemed to have 100 steps, and each step seemed to have a subtlety to it that made Jamie's ability to solve them seem arbitrary, magic, or a gift from above. Time to try another one.

  "Extra Problem 7. Find the temperature 2 feet from the leading edge of a flat plate that is infinitely wide, infinitely long, and has a uniform flow of water going over it. The heat flux to the plate is uniform, at 4,000 Btu per square foot.

  Right. I wondered why anyone would care about a flat plate that was infinitely long and infinitely wide. The biggest plate I'd ever seen was round and underneath a 20-inch pizza. This problem seemed almost as obscure as the infinitely long cylinder of uniform charge that made me into a nonphysicist.

  I started my attempt. Step 1. Draw picture.

  What would give you uniform heat flux anyway? If the heat flux is uniform, why isn't the temperature uniform? Ack-ack, as Bill the Cat would say.

  Step 2. Look for similar sample problem in book. There isn't one that's even close.

  Step 3. Look through four different heat transfer books on office mate's shelf. Rohsenow said yesterday that we could bring to the test any book we wanted to. "The only thing you can't bring," he said with a wink, "is a consultant." There's nothing in them, either.

  Step 4. Look through class notes, then office mate's class notes from previous year's lecture. Another dead end.