The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  Step 5. Think about what's going on in the problem. Refer to the picture. Redraw the picture.

  Maybe the point of the two infinities is to simplify the problem so you don't have to worry about what happens at edges. This will enable the problem to be solved as if things vary in two directions only, i.e., in a plane.

  I still wondered what would produce a uniform heat flux and why it mattered. Then I saw the article about the Seabrook nuclear plant on the front page of Matt's Globe. Atoms splitting underneath the plate might appear to be a uniform heat flow.

  Water or some other coolant would have to flow over the top of the plate. Otherwise the plate, no matter what it was made of, would melt. The China syndrome in class Two fifty-five.

  If the water is coming from the left, and the plate is really really hot, hotter than the water, then the water will be coolest at the left end of the plate, and more of it will get hotter farther and farther away from the plate. The hotter the water is, the less it can cool the plate. Ergo, the plate gets hotter as you go downstream.

  The trick they have to get right at the nuke plant is to make sure the plate isn't so long that its temperature goes above the melting point of what it's made of. Who would want to eat a tomato as big as a beach ball?

  But wait. Rohsenow is they. If I can figure out how to do this problem, I am they.

  As I started setting up the formula, Eddy the janitor knocked on the door and came in to empty the wastebasket. Eddy had an uncanny resemblance to Monsieur Nicaise, the technician who built parts of my experiment in the heat transfer lab in Belgium. It seemed a little like the resemblance that the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man had to Aunty Em's farmhands in The Wizard of Oz. Eddy was born in Sicily.

  "How's it going, Peppy? You're here kind of late, aren't you?" My name sounds like Peppy in Italian.

  "It's only eleven. The night is young," I said. "I've got my first test tomorrow and I want to be as prepared as possible."

  He answered, "Don't get too wrapped up in your work. Have some fun sometimes. Some of these graduate students just work for five years-then maybe at the end their experiment doesn't work and they don't get their master's or Ph.D. They must feel like they wasted all those years and there's nothing left to live for. Some of my janitor colleagues have found these students hanging from the pipe in the offices they're supposed to clean up. It ruins their shift. Don't let it happen to you."

  It's true. I'd heard about MIT's suicide problem from people who knew people who went here, but I'd shoved the knowledge aside and forgotten about it. I wondered who I knew, or didn't yet know, who might not survive. Or whether it was me.

  "I'll try to keep things in perspective," I assured him. "Do you know of any offices around that have couches in them? I don't want to waste the time it'll take to ride my bike home tonight and back in tomorrow morning."

  "Sure. There's one just down the hall. Just find me in Building 5."

  "OK. For now I want a change of scenery. I'm going to the student center library for a couple of hours," I said.

  The student center library is open twenty-four hours a day. It's on the fifth floor of the student center. The tables are brown veneer; the chairs are Naugahyde. This is where the power tools go in the middle of the night. It is also where some MIT students live. Some little alcoves are pretty dark, and underneath the chairs or in a cubbyhole somewhere they keep their toothbrushes and razors. At least the ones who brush their teeth and shave do. The trick to sleeping here is to put two of the lounge chairs across from each other and lean on the arm of one with your legs on the seat of the other.

  The student center library is on the fifth floor, but there isn't a view of the playing fields. There are windows, but they look onto a concrete sidewalk and exterior wall. This is to prevent you from lobbing one of the Naugahyde chairs through the window and following it after your eighth consecutive all-nighter.

  I found an empty chair at a table across from an Oriental student who was reading a textbook entitled Semiconductor Physics. He tapped his foot on the chair leg in a semirandom rhythm, once or twice a second. At the same time he twirled his pen like a baton from his little finger to his thumb and back again every ten foot taps.

  It made it difficult to concentrate. "Excuse me, would you mind stopping that?" I asked him.

  "Stopping what?"

  "Never mind." I went to another table and studied until 1:30. I knew it was time to stop when I realized I had been looking at one sheet of Rohsenow's lecture notes for fifteen minutes. Looking at it as if it were a sheet of Chinese writing that meant nothing to me, just marks on a page. I was asleep with my eyes open.

  2:00 A. M.

  I asked another janitor whether he'd seen Eddy.

  "He's at lunch." I guess if you work the 10:00 to 6:30 shift, 2:00 A.M. would be lunchtime. I went toward my office and found Eddy pulling a mop and scrub bucket out of the hall closet. He opened the door to the office with the early American couch. I took two lab jackets off the hook on the inside of the door and used them as blankets for my nap.

  At 6:15 Eddy knocked on the door again. "Here, Peppy, I made you a cappucino. Just like my mama makes. A little espresso and a lot of sugar and milk. Now you get going again in your studying and do well on that test."

  At 2:00 P.M. the test began in the classroom with the twenty of us using our little deskettes from the chair arms to write in our bluebooks. Rohsenow was at a Dynatech directors' meeting and Jamie left the room for most of the test. Professionals do not cheat. Problem 1 was surprisingly easy and took twenty minutes. Problem 2 was a little like the one I'd done last night, so at least I had something to put on the paper. Not yet torpedoed, my head was still above water.

  8:00 P.m. October 9

  Another Friday night and I don't got nobody. Ain't got no money 'cause I don't get paid.

  It was getting colder outside. The deco desk lamp with builtin ashtray warmed my face and my hands. The only lamp, it made a pool of soft light on the writing tablet on the desk's dark green blotter. The fluorescent light above buzzed too much.

  "Friday, October 9, 1981

  Dear Stephanie,

  . . . As you know, my father, now over seventy, has had some health problems. Maybe part of why I asked you was to please him, to be married while he was still with us. I didn't want to hurt you. I hope you will someday find it in your heart to forgive me.... ..

  Thunk, echoed the mailbox in the Building 7 lobby. Par avion, to Brussels.

  C H A P T E R

  4

  Midterm

  Columbus Day was clear, windy, and warm with Indian summer sun, and the Charles was full of sailboats. Jim Stuart and I watched them from the middle of Memorial Drive while we waited for the 10,000 women to pass in the Bonnie Belle race.

  They passed at all speeds. They were American-free thinkers, every one of them.

  Thursday, October 15

  I sat next to Mary Patterson in the third row in Gyftopoulos's class. She wore faded jeans and a black T-shirt with a skull on the front. The skull had the stars and stripes of the American flag on it and "Sport Death" written in big letters beneath. The teeth were shaped faintly like letters, and they spelled "Only life can kill you."

  "That's an interesting T-shirt," I said. "Where'd you get it?"

  "I was in Senior House as an undergrad. This is the dorm logo."

  "Was there a contest and that won?"

  "I don't know the full history," she said. "I think somebody swiped the skull off the cover of some book by Hunter Thompson. As for the 'Sport Death,' I don't know if anyone knows where that started."

  "Senior House sounds like a fun place. Did you go to MIT?I asked her.

  "Yeah, I graduated in '78. I've worked at Dynatech for the past three years. But it seemed that if I wanted to be a big wheel in research and development I needed at least a master's and preferably a Ph.D. Otherwise I could get stuck running coffee."

  I asked her how she liked Dynatech.

&
nbsp; She answered, "It's really good. They give all the engineers private offices-well, okay, none of them has windows but it's better than the 'pigpens' that some of my friends who got jobs in aerospace work in. And the work is really interesting."

  "What's a pigpen?"

  "That's what the engineers who work in those big open offices with rows and rows of desks call them. There's no privacy, and it's really hard to concentrate. The trick there is to shine enough so you get one of the outside offices with a door," she said.

  I hadn't yet worked in a real job, so this was disturbing news.

  I said to her, "I wonder whether it's too late to transfer to law school." She laughed. "By the way," I added, "I like your ring. Where'd you get it?"

  "This is my brass rat," she said. It was a signet ring, with a beaver, the MIT mascot, as the signet. "That reminds me, now that I'm back in school here, I have to turn the ring around so the signet's against my palm when I make a fist."

  "Why's that?" I asked.

  "When you're here, the beaver uses you as a toilet. After you get your degree, you're one with the beaver, so you turn the ring around and you and the beaver use the rest of the world as a toilet," she said.

  I could see the validity of at least the first part of the metaphor. Mary had the same confidence that the TPP people had, but she was smarter. Four years of undergrad work here probably does that to a person. Her confidence scared me a little, but there was also a gentleness in her eyes. I hoped we would become friends.

  Gyftopoulos started the lecture of the day. Up until now the presentation was completely foreign. He and Beretta had presented their own language of thermodynamics, including new terms like "available energy," "stable equilibrium state," and "perpetual motion machines of the first and second kind." Today the lectureon Maxwell's relations-was similar to one I'd heard at Hopkins.

  Maxwell's relations were invented or discovered by James Clerk Maxwell, the nineteenth-century British physicist who also invented or discovered Maxwell's equation for the relationship between electric and magnetic fields. Those nineteenth-century guys did everything. After Watt's engine, after Carnot's theory, after Clausius's entropy, Maxwell came along with relations that enable you to take measurable quantities like temperature, pressure, and volume and figure out the magnitude of the more abstract quantities, like energy and entropy.

  And so today's lecture presented Maxwell's relations. They were all partial derivatives. Since, for example, entropy, whatever that is, is a function of temperature and pressure, a very small change in entropy can be thought of as the sum of a small change in temperature's effect on entropy and a small change in pressure's effect on entropy. Simple enough. But when you then look at the same analysis for energy, and another thing they call enthalpy, and when they shoot all this at you in an hour and a half, it quickly becomes soup. There are so many equations in your notes that it's nearly impossible to know what the important ones are, what the intermediate steps are, and how they all fit together. It all goes so fast and it's hard enough just to write the stuff down, much less comprehend anything and follow the reasoning.

  Mary's notes were perfectly neat, like Matt's, uncluttered and useful. She even had time to draw little leafed plants in the margins.

  At the end of the lecture, Gyftopoulos made a final note. "What I've just presented is exactly what you will see in a physical chemistry class, or a physics class in thermodynamics. This is scientific knowledge. What you will find, though, in the real world is that the scientific knowledge is the easy part. At least it is logically consistent and invariant. What you will have to do as engineers is make assumptions about the systems you are designing. Making assumptions that enable you to produce something that works while being consistent with the scientific principles can be very difficult."

  I wondered what he meant.

  "By the way," he continued, "the first quiz will be October 29, two weeks from today."

  I said to Mary, "That date rings a bell with me, but I can't place it, like it's the date of some historic event."

  "Try Black Thursday 1929, the stock market crash."

  "You've got a great memory. Are you doing anything for lunch?" I asked.

  "I'm getting my car inspected," she replied in a nonrejecting tone. "Maybe some other time."

  Friday afternoon I went to the fluids tutorial. This was conducted on the second floor of Building 1, by Kamel Gemayel, from Lebanon. At a tutorial, you ask questions about how to do problems. It's also your chance to make the professor look stupid, which is only fair since they have so many chances to make you look stupid. Gemayel was a nice guy, though, so nobody wanted to make him look stupid.

  Building 1 adjoins Memorial Drive and the classroom's window looked right onto leaf level of the trees along each side of the drive. It was a blue sky afternoon through the window and the leaves were brilliantly golden and the wind blew on the Charles as it had on Monday, only cooler. Fall was fully with us, with little chance for more warm weather. The waves made me think back to my canoe-tripping days.

  Gemayel presented problem C-32. Oil and water were between two plates, and a wave of the water moved down the length of the plates. Naturally the plates were infinitely long. The problem asked you to relate the wave speed to the density of the oil and the water and the height of the wave. He went through the derivation of the solution from his notes. It wasn't a wave on a lake, but it was a start.

  The Libyan nuclear engineering student next to me asked Gemayel to do problem C-33; it asked us to calculate the frequency of oscillation of a ship of a given size in waves of given sizes. This was a new problem, added this year, so Gemayel didn't have a written solution. In fact, he'd never looked at the problem before.

  He hemmed and he hawwed for five minutes, going around in some circles, and then he finally said, "Did anyone here do this problem?" The Korean sitting in front of me got up and wrote the solution.

  It was comforting to see that a professor wasn't omniscient, but it was equally discomforting to see that the Korean, who would be on my bell curve, was smarter than the professor.

  Rohsenow made us wait until after the class to hand back the heat transfer tests. The first thing he did was draw the bell curve, with a number line from 0 to 20. He drew the x's before he spoke: One x at 7, two at 9, four at 10, none at 11, two at 12, four at 13, six at 14, and another eight between 15 and 20.

  "The data came out pretty much the way Jamie and I expected," Rohsenow said. "Now if you're here, or to the right, that's good," he said, pointing to the 14. "If you're to the left of here, well maybe you should do some more problems or think about dropping."

  With 3,400 hard-borrowed dollars invested in tuition, dropping a course is not an option.

  The blue books were all sitting on the front table. After the lecture we pushed to the table, rummaging through the pile in turn to find our own.

  I hoped the grades weren't put on the front cover, but they were. Mine was 14-I made class average. I remembered in elementary school the verbal version of grades: "A, excellent, B, good, C, average, D, poor." Average had always seemed a bad thing back when I was smart. But here I just breathed a big sigh of relief. Average meant B.

  I bumped into Mary on the way out of the class. She was at the door of her office, offering words of encouragement to an undergrad who was taking two twenty, the undergrad version of Fluids. Mary had a teaching assistantship, which meant she graded problem sets and helped the students with any questions they might have. She, like any good TA, did more teaching than the professors. She did not bite her students' heads off for not understanding. And there was almost always someone at her office, so she must have known her stuff.

  "Did your car pass the inspection?" I asked.

  "Sure did. Not bad for a '77 Chevette. I didn't even have to pour any money into it. I'm about to go down to the Friday night beer blast. Care to come along?"

  "That sounds like fun." We went downstairs to the lounge between Mikic's office and Charlot
te Evans's office. The area was packed with people: circles of gray-haired professors talking to one another, circles of graduate students talking to one another and to their advisers, the assistant professors. And there was the occasional undergraduate. The atmosphere was wired, but in a friendly way.

  "Hey, soccer star," Carlos said to me.

  "Moi?"

  "Yeah, you. How's it going?"

  "Fine, thanks. How about you?"

  "Good. Say, you met Jim Stuart? He's in that Technology Policy program," Carlos said as Jim walked up to us.

  "Of course he has," Jim said. "Everyone knows Pepper."

  Professor Mikic walked up to Mary and gave her a light pat on the shoulder. "It's good to see you back here," he said.

  He looked at me and said, "I am Mary's mentor. She has been one of the students I am most proud of. And how are things going with you?"

  "I'm surviving, so far anyway," Mary said.

  We exchanged further pleasantries and headed for the refreshment table. Mary pointed out a blond-haired guy with a mustache. "That's Peter Huber. He started here as a freshman the same time I did. He had his Ph.D. by the time he was twenty-three, and he's now an assistant professor and he goes to Harvard Law School full time. I hear he's already gotten an offer to clerk for Justice O'Connor in the Supreme Court."

  "OK, but how's his golf game?"

  "He doesn't play golf. I don't think he plays, period. I don't know anybody more focused and directed than he."

  "Who's the white-haired guy over there with the beard, talking to Shapiro?" I asked.

  "That's 'Maharajah Hank' Paynter. He's the resident controls genius. He kept all the sewers in Boston from backing up once when he did some emergency consulting at the treatment plant in the harbor. A pipe had broken or a valve had stuck and the whole place was out of control. He took out a portable computer he'd developed and simulated the system on it and told them what valves to open, what valves to close, and how fast to do it."