The Idea Factory

by Pepper White

  On Monday they examine you orally. They present you with a problem; you have twenty minutes to look at it and try to solve it or at least think up something to say about it, and then you present your solution and/or answer their questions for twenty minutes. To discourage cheating, the forty-minute periods are consecutive, with no time allowed to go from one room to the other. Thus you run from examination room to examination room, to have as much of the twenty minutes of preparation time as possible.

  And on Tuesday, you present your research work to date. This enables them to evaluate whether you are able to "do research."

  December 31

  Twenty days to go. New Year's Eve. No one in the Sloan Lab except Mr. and Mrs. Tung, the Chinese couple across the hall with the foul-smelling seaweed they cooked on their hot plate. Their New Year's Eve was in February.

  Solo. This is how it ends. By yourself. Do it yourself. Plow through the problem sets alone. Alone with Newton, with Lagrange. Alone with the authors of the textbooks. Pattern recognition, no time to look deep into the problems, just time to pick up as many tricks from worked-out solution sets as possible. Try problem; get stuck. Look at solution set for hint. Continue. Get stuck again. Look at solution set again.

  By the second or third of the same type of problem the pattern becomes clearer. And then you hope the problem on the qualifiers will include the trick you have internalized.

  At 10:30 even Mr. and Mrs. Tung had left; the only noise left was the filter from Mary's fish tank loud through the locked door of her office. On the way back to Senior House the institute was empty. The infinite corridor, normally populated at all hours, was empty for all of its 319 paces. So was every other corridor. Only a nerd's nerd studies at 11:30 on New Year's Eve.

  1984. More Dynamics (Lincoln's class, B plus), plus review of Statics (Professor Hill, B plus plus, the highest B in the class, not an A). I skipped from book to book, closing the conceptual gaps. In Statics, the weight sits on the beam. In Dynamics, the weight moves up and down. In System Dynamics (David Miller, A with the navy guys), the weight moves up and down and you call the beam a spring. The same weight, the same beam.

  January 2

  The Globe article on the front of the Living section with the funnies in it said, "We learn to strive for and 'need' external symbols of our worth, instead of enjoying the process of learning, accomplishing, and mastering, which is a more natural human gratification." That's MIT in a nutshell. The grades are the external symbols of worth. Objective, quantitative, like an SAT score, like an IQ, a salary, a bank balance, a Dow Jones average, a lottery number. It's all such a crock.

  I set out to learn and master more of Fluid Mechanics. This was the last time the external motivation of the qualifying examinations would make me internalize more deeply how fluids behaved. It became clearer to me why Peppermint Patty's tea leaves went to the center of the cup. The smokestack plume I'd wanted to understand had not only boiler exhaust but two counterrotating vortices. It took on the abstract beauty of chemical equations and vector calculus.

  January 3-5

  More Fluids, and some Solids. It was all physics underneath, balanced forces, balanced moments, continuity. The physics of everyday life. Vortices at the edge of buildings. Bridges shaking when trucks drive by. Skyscrapers buffeted by the wind. A solid breaks when the force applied is too big; a fluid continues to deform, to adjust to the force.

  I met Professor Hill on the infinite corridor.

  "Yes, I really enjoyed the opportunity to review everything at once, back in the '50s when I took the exams," he said. "You'll find that just three or four equations govern a heck of a lot of phenomena."

  January 6

  Party at Chet's house. Chet didn't have a lot of furniture in his three-bedroom Cape in Lexington. Perhaps he would marry and fill it with kids and furniture once he was tenured.

  In a circle of conversation, Chet said, "The qualifiers are a good measurement of your knowledge relative to your peers, but they're not a good absolute measure. A lot happens at the results meeting, when the professors get together and duke it out or decline to duke it out for their students. It's supposed to be entirely objective, quantitative, but there is a fair amount of subjective evaluation that goes into it."

  "So, Chet, are you going to fight for me at that meeting?" I asked.

  "I'll be giving a paper in Detroit that day."

  On the way back from the party, in Ben's car, the radio played Brenda Lee. She sang, "Breeaakk it ... to me gintleeee ..."

  January 7

  Depression. Staring out the window. Inability to function. Inability to think. It comes with this territory. They pick you up like a bolt, examine you for flaws from all angles. If you are good, they put you in the bin with all the other high-priced bolts. If you don't meet the specs, they throw you in the scrap heap. In either case, they don't treat you like a human being.

  January 8

  Bicycle ride to escape. Lincoln again, Sudbury. England-like gray, snowy, wintry dead landscapes. I input a sinusoidal forcing function to the bicycle through my knees going up and down like pistons; my lower legs were connecting rods to the shaft on the two-cylinder engine. My weight stored the energy and converted the alternating input into a direct output, fifteen miles per hour.

  The soda machines at the gas stations along the route haunted me. In two weeks I'd have my shot at being "Dr. Pepper."

  January 9

  Ben and I got together to review Controls. Ben was turning out to be a star student, what with straight A's and all. Normally no one studies together for the qualifiers, because one of you probably will end up teaching the other and if you do that then you'll be at a disadvantage and you'll have wasted some time that might have given you some insight that would help on one of the tests. But there were a few exceptions to this rule.

  "I tell you," Ben said, "ever since I was accepted here and they included in the acceptance letter the packet of sample questions from the previous qualifiers, I've been thinking about them. It's been over two years now and they're only ten days away. It's hard to believe. I haven't been sleeping well recently, and I must spend an hour on the john every day. I mean, if I don't make it, it'll haunt me for the rest of my life, like every time I turn on the TV set or pick up Time magazine there'll be some guy from MIT giving his authoritative opinion on something and I'll say to myself, 'That could have been me if I'd just worked harder.' "

  T minus ten

  Songs ran through me. "I don't care what they do to me, they can't take away my dignity," and "Makin' it / No more fakin' it, this time in life I'm makin' it." What a culture we have.

  At the cafeteria, I sat with Carlos Lopez and some of the other remaining guys from the Heat Transfer lab soccer team, the guys I'd maintained close friendships with through our ten minute hallway chats every three or four months for the past two years. I told them about the song line about my dignity.

  "You're wrong about that," Carlos said. "Your dignity is the first thing that goes. It's sort of like that scene in Deliverance where the guy's getting raped and the redneck says, 'Squeal boy; squeal like a pig.' This is the last time the professors have any power over you. After the exams, pass or fail, you're your own person. They know that, so they want to nail you."

  Oh, come on, it can't be that bad.

  'By the way," Carlos continued. "You got your kneepads?"

  I said, "Yeah, I'll need them so I can kneel before them and beg them, 'Please, please, let me be in your club. I want people to seek advice from me and think I'm one of the smartest people in the world ... even though I'm not.' "

  "Hey, I like that," Carlos said. "Especially the punch line."

  T minus nine

  Nick was at the lathe. "Yeah, Peppah, I hope you make it. Maybe you'll be a lifer here. It happens to a lot of people. They keep passing the tests and before you know it, boom, they've got tenure. They've got a good life, those professors. Secure base pay, fourday-a-week job, eight months a year, the rest of the
time starting their companies and consulting and writing their books. They're their own men. I can see why you want to try to be like them. By the way, did I tell you they're lettin' me go?"

  "That's great, Nick. Where are they letting you go?"

  "No, you don't understand. They're layin' me off."

  "They're giving you the axe?"

  "It's pink slip time. Just like from the tire plant in Watertown. I can't complain, though. I been here twenty years and the pen- sion'll keep me an' my honey bear in the house in Ahlington. I'll come in one or two days a week, though, sort of like a whadaya call ... consultant."

  "Gee, Nick, the place just wouldn't be any fun without you," I said.

  "Don't worry, Cap'n. We'll always have the rapid compression machine."

  T minus eight

  Philosophy time. Forget passing or failing; learn what I can learn. Ask professor in controls group about Stability. Stability in the Dynamics (Lincoln, course two nine four) sense tells you things like whether or not your car will flip over going around a turn too fast. Stability in the Controls sense (two fourteen) tells you things like whether the robot arm you're working on will bounce back and forth and break itself apart.

  Since the Controls class was called "System Dynamics and Controls" and the Dynamics class was called "Dynamics," I thought there must be a connection between the two different meanings of stability. The anonymous tenured professor hemmed and hawwed and in fact he didn't know. He escaped with "I'm deliberately being evasive. I think you should work these things out for yourself."

  I wasn't satisfied. I knocked on Professor Crandall's door. He was one of the 10 percent creme de la creme of MIT professors who give the institute its reputation. He wore a bow tie and half glasses and a suit, and his course, Methods in Engineering Analysis, was an MIT classic. A Turkish friend at the von Karman institute had first told me about him.

  I repeated my question. "I'd like to see the connection between stability in the two oh two (System Dynamics) sense and in the two nine four (Dynamics) sense."

  "Yes," he said softly, deliberately. "It's a continuum of thought. You see, if you draw your automobile going around a turn, and if you look at moving it away from its equilibrium position by a small amount as it goes around that curve, you'll arrive at a second-order differential equation for how it will return to that equilibrium position. The coefficients in that equation determine the natural frequency and damping of the system, and those are the same coefficients you use when designing a controller to, for example, prevent the vehicle from flipping over."

  He pulled a piece of scrap paper from the desk drawer reserved for scrap paper and sketched the similarities. I asked other questions, and he presented at least two ways of looking at each.

  He confirmed my hunch that a problem is like a machine inside a clear cube. When you look at one side of the cube you see what some of the machine looks like. But to understand it thoroughly, you have to pick up the cube and look at it from above, below, from all sides, shake it to see the connections.

  T minus seven and counting

  Snowstorm. Large flakes out the window from Atkinson 302's bedroom. I looked at the guidebook to the Fluids films from the first term. Every snowflake affects every other snowflake. Vortices carved horseshoes around trees; vortices shed off comers of buildings. Howard Gelman wore gym shorts, a T-shirt, black socks, and high-top Keds.

  T minus six

  Ming Tsang, Professor Keck's student from the People's Republic of China, ate lunch with me. He was studying for the qualifiers, too. On the way across Mass. Ave., Ming met one of his friends. "Disa man first Ph.D. at MIT from PRC," Ming said. "Ifah I pass qualifiers, I be number 30, 35."

  "Gee, you guys should each have a T-shirt with your number on it," I said. They laughed.

  Ming said, "You come to our study group tomorrow? I meet with some friends at 3-249, 7:00 P.M."

  "Sounds good," I said.

  These guys are smarter than 2 billion Chinese and I'm going to be competing against them. I just hope they have poor reading skills that will slow them down.

  T minus five

  There were two others at the review session with Ming. One would take the exams this month, the other in May. They both looked worried. If I failed, I'd find a job at about 30 grand a year and begin to build up equity. If they failed they'd be on the first 747 back to the world's largest prison.

  One of the worried ones, Mr. Wang, said, "I want exam be over. I be study five week straight now, since two weeks before Christmas. Twelve hours every day. I did every problem in back of Fluid book, Thermo book, Control book, Mechanics books. Now I start review reading."

  So that's what it takes. I bet these guys don't have motivational lapses or get depressed. They beat it with work.

  Ming pulled out a one-inch stack of papers from his backpack. They were problems from previous qualifying exams, with solutions, above and beyond the packet of sample problems Charlotte Evans had given to me. Perfectly legal; the China network had produced good files. Ming ran the session; the four of us sat around a card table.

  "How 'bou dissa one?" Ming said as he put the first problem on the center of the table. It was a car's valve and rocker-arm assembly, assembelee assembelee.

  "I tinka we have to do Lagrangian formulation for two degree of freedom system," Mr. Wang said. The others agreed and who was I to disagree?

  Next problem. Again a quick look at the problem, a few words of discussion, and a decision on the principle involved. Boom boom boom the pattern continued, and we finished the stack of forty problems in less than an hour. Lord help us if these guys ever learn to build cars and VCRs.

  Mr. Yuen, the third one, suggested, "Les try dissa one for five minutes; pretend it's oral exam. Say we have to say something after five minutes."

  The problem was to design a wavy ramp for beer barrels to roll down. It couldn't be a straight ramp because the barrels would go too fast by the time they reached the bottom. What things should be considered in the design of the ramp? Mr. Yuen called on me. "Whatta you think?"

  "It looks to me as if the point is to figure out how many ripples to put in the ramp. That will affect the number of barrels you can send down the ramp, and it'll tell you whether or not the barrels will run into each other on the way down. The ripples should be designed so that the frequency of the beer barrels pushing on the structure is far away from the resonant frequency of the structure," I said.

  "And you need to consider effect of beer rotating in the barrel," Mr. Yuen said. We discussed it further before breaking.

  As we left the room, Ming encouraged me. He said, "I tinka you pass."

  T minus four

  Kwang, the Korean shipbuilding engineer from Hyundai with whom I'd studied in Professor Hill's Statics class, who wrote on every square inch of paper, front and back, because paper is scarce in Korea, was in the student center library. He was preparing for the qualifiers in ocean engineering.

  "At this point I don't care what happens," he said. "Just as long as I keep my health."

  Professors who would be examining me in the orals walked around the institute. They were there before-I recognized them from the department seminars and the faculty meetings and the stories I'd heard from the other students. But now it was as if I were a spy and I had a photo of the Russian spy who was assigned to kill me and I'd spotted him but he didn't know who I was yet. Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep.

  I talked to Chet Yeung again. I told him about the songs I'd been thinking of.

  He said, "You might try 'To Dream the Impossible Dream.' No, seriously, though, I know what you're going through. When I went through those examinations I often found myself staring out the window for hours at a time, wondering why I put myself through it."

  T minus three

  High idea flux (flow per unit area). I came to MIT wanting to see the physical principles around me, and today everything shouted its principle out at me: masses and springs and dampers in cars
, beams bending underfoot in buildings, more vortices in smokestacks and jet airplane con-trails and corners of buildings. I studied not in a room, but in a box with dashed lines into which mass and energy entered and out of which it exited. I wanted to make the ideas orderly; I wanted to turn the analysis off and on on demand; but it was stuck in the on position.

  I went to the music library to seek refuge. Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. The motor provided a torque and an angular acceleration to the rotational inertia of the turntable. Big chord. Small chord, oboe. Scale. Scale. A musical scale permuted and repeated elegantly. Powerfully. Simply. Goosebumps. Chord. Scale again. A computer will never make music like this.

  T minus two

  I picked up the examination briefing packet from Charlotte Evans: a gray envelope with my name typed on the white label; five sheets of paper inside listing the names of the contestants, twenty-nine others and me; the times of their exams; the tight timetable matrix for the oral exams so we'd have no time to cheat; the schedule for the thesis presentations on Tuesday. The topics were impressive: "Control of Dynamic Interaction between a Manipulator and Its World," "Corrosion Control in a Hostile Environment," "Technological Support for the Involvement of the Sight-Impaired in Sports," "Diesel Combustion in a Rapid Compression Machine."

  I couldn't sleep that night. The vortices and masses and springs interacted and danced through me-they wouldn't go away. But I wasn't bored. I was thinking in Cartesian coordinates. I was.

  T minus one

  The day before. One last pass through my notebooks. At noon, I took Chet's advice and locked away my books. I wanted to make myself tired enough to sleep before the exams so I took a walk in the snow. Halfway across the Harvard Bridge, the institute was everywhere: I. M. Pei ('40, Architecture) had designed the John Hancock Building. David Wormley ('62, Mechanical Engineering) was part of the team that fixed it. On the Cambridge side of the Charles, the institute, steel blue-gray, with smokestack plumes behind, Ionic columns and neoclassical authority ahead, challenged me to meet its standard-absolute, unforgiving, unassailably the best.