MIT Undergraduate (1946-1959)
Having been out of High School since 1942 and very rusty academically, I started intensive study of the college entrance exam guides while still in Washington during the winter of 1945, passed the exams in spring with grades high enough to be admitted to MIT in fall of 1946.
The class of ‘50 was famous for bulging with mature, world-wise, highly motivated and hard-working veterans supported by the GI Bill. Most were strongly opposed to president K.T. Compton’s advocacy of Universal Service because they thought it would perpetuate militarism. When Compton mounted the podium for his welcome speech. He looked over the thousand grim faces and said "Is there anyone here who thinks his military service made him militaristic?" Slowly a thousand smiles dissolved the tension. Compton outlined his vision of what later became President Kennedy’s Peace Corps.
After a few nights on a cot in the gymnasium and rush-week visits to several fraternity houses (which I didn’t like at all) I was assigned along with a thousand other freshmen to a cell in "building 22", now a temporary dorm, the former radiation laboratory where radar had been developed.
I had till spring to declare my major, and soon made a momentous decision. Maximum effort and no social life or piano for the first semester. I would test my talents against my freshman class mates (half of whom flunked out). If I did very well I would major in physics. If I did moderately well, electrical engineering. Even less well, mechanical and if mediocre civil engineering. To everybody’s surprise including my own, I was one of only two freshmen out of twelve hundred who finished the first semester with a cumulative grade of 5.0 out of a possible 5.0.
The die was cast, the oracle had spoken. I had become a legend. Even at my fiftieth reunion in 2000 I was greeted with "So you’re the guy who got a 5.0 cum the first semester!" I majored in Physics because I wanted to understand the universe and because it would open the doors to all branches of engineering, all of which are really just specialized applications of physics.
Even more important: I realized that I did not have to become a monomaniac (the word "nerd" had not yet been invented) to excel. I could lead a balanced life, pursue many interests, and still be the best.
Accordingly, I laid plans for a balanced undergraduate career during the spring semester.
I made friends with Phil Bagley, another serious pianist and a wealthy and very enterprising freshman too young to have served in the military. We agreed that he would buy a brand new Steinway concert grand and I would arrange to keep it in the basement studio of the MIT radio station and pay for monthly tuning and other maintenance. MIT didn’t own a single practice piano at the time.
I also availed myself of Phil’s dating service known as "Bagley’s Bags". His girl friend at Wellesley kept a 4x6 card file of available Wellesley student profiles which enabled Phil to offer his MIT friends pre-selected dates for a consideration (I said Phil was very enterprising), without the need to "pick a blind card" at an acquaintance dance. I dated two or three "bags", but found them to be too immature and just plain shallow to be worth spending my very limited time with.
Then I made friends with a group of classmates interested in general philosophy, and we had a hot chocolate club Friday nights to discuss everything from cosmology to biology, psychology and religion. They included Harry Parke, Doug Porter, John King, Fred Cann, and several whose names I don’t recall.
One of the most exciting events of the forties was the publication of a small booklet by Erwin Schrödinger, the Austrian physicist, called "What is Life?", a contribution all but forgotten. Schrödinger made the point that the human genome contained in every cell can only be encoded in a molecular structure because no other medium could come even close to storing the amount of information in the available volume, or with the incredibly reliable reproduction during mitosis. The rest is history. It took half a century for Crick and Watson to discover the genetic code. It is interesting that Watson mentioned Schrödinger’s book as an important inspiration when interviewed on a NOVA program in 2001.
Other important books we discussed were Arnold Toynbee’s "Study of History" and Bertrand Russel’s many essays, André Gide, and of course Einstein.
While exploring the basement one day in my freshman year I came upon the lab built in the thirties by Prof Francis Bitter where he was generating the world’s strongest magnetic fields. They were being used at the time to explore the quadratic Zeeman effect in the spectroscopy laboratory. Francis fed 2 megawatts (10,000 amps at 200 volts) into a helical magnet the size of an automobile tire cooled with 800 gallons per minute of water. The magnets were made of a stack of copper sheets. It was a tour de force I admired. Meeting Francis Bitter was a stroke of fate that affected my entire life. Francis became my mentor and collaborator. It is interesting that Francis’s father was the famous Austrian sculptor who set up a studio in New York in 1911 where he sculpted most of the statues in Central Park. More of Francis later.
I also made friends with the Department of Modern Languages, William Locke, head, and Barbara Fleming, secretary, and in particular Professor Fritjov Raven. Raven had gotten involved in doing technical translations, but really was not technically competent. He was more interested in philology. Fluent in Old Icelandic, Old High German, Sanscrit, Latin, Greek, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portugese, ("the first dozen are the hardest", he used to say). He was anxious to have me take over his translation service, and I certainly could use some money to supplement my GI Bill budget.
By summer vacation I had acquired a list of a dozen foreign students with assorted language and technical expertise, a bookshelf of technical dictionaries and handbooks, a Royal typewriter and a wire recorder (predecessor of the tape recorder). I dictated my translations as fast as I could read the originals and then typed them. Sometimes I had Babs Fleming do the typing . My clients included most of the Boston Patent Law firms, the Polaroid Corporation, then engaged in a patent battle with a Swiss inventor who had a more or less legitimate claim to Edwin Land’s instant photography process, and the US Navy Taylor Model Basin with which I had a contract to translate all of the German Navy’s secret technology. It was both very educational and lucrative, at two cents per word. The translation service, with much help from Elizabeth, provided discretionary income through graduate school and the early marriage years and into the building of Weir Meadow.
One of my later clients was a class mate named Bob Cesari who became a patent attorney. Cornelia married his nephew.
By the end of my first MIT summer I had made enough money to buy my first motorcycle, a Harley 125 cc two-stroke mini-bike. I took cold fall tours through the Green Mountains of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and a Thanksgiving visit to my parents in Philadelphia.
In retrospect I I marvel at how many activities I could manage. I obviously didn’t waste much time sleeping. In Edna St Vincent Millay’s words
Cut if you will, with Sleep’s dull knife,
Each day to half its length, my friend, -
The years that Time takes off my life,
He’ll take from the other end!
My sophomore year was even busier. In addition to running the MIT Translation Service and practicing piano regularly, I got Professor Struik’s permission to enroll in his graduate course in Tensor Analysis, not for credit. I needed it to understand general relativity. I also found a book on Galois Group Theory while browsing the Coop book store, and found it fascinating for its own sake.
MIT had hired Klaus Liepman, a German conductor and musicologist to bring musical culture to this trade school, and funded him to install a music library in the new Hayden library building. Suddenly we had eight sound-proof rooms with pianos for practicing and listening to records and a symphony orchestra. Liepman decided to include Mozart’s piano concerto Number twenty four in the grand opening performance during spring semester, and called for pianists to audition. I spent all of Christmas vacation practicing and auditioned, but lost to a German student named Michael Koerner. He was too young to have spent time in the Army and was clearly in better shape technically. I didn’t envy his victory, but I thoroughly resented his heavy-handed interpretation of Mozart.
At the same time an alumnus who was president of the Baldwin Organ Company donated a four-manual electric organ which was installed on the balcony of Walker Memorial auditorium. I got a key and permission to use it with earphones daytime, and with full speakers at night. Somehow I found time to practice the organ again, after my early instruction by the organist at Kenyon College (see chapter on military service).
The academic highlight was Professor Stockbarger’s sophomore lab course in which my team grew crystals during the fall semester, and measured the universal constant of gravitation during the spring semester. Despite all of this extracurricular activity I still managed to get very good grades.
Junior year I took Professor George Warren’s lab course in x-ray spectroscopy, Professor Slater’s course in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and in senior year Prof Bernard Feld’s course in Theoretical Physics and Hildebrand’s course in computation techniques (just before the digital age). In retrospect I marvel at how much I could fit into my schedule, while at the same time running the MIT Translation Service, and doing a very challenging bachelor thesis.
My bachelor thesis pursued my lifelong interest in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and my affinity for extremes and for challenging, leading-edge science. My objective was to measure so-called "second sound" in liquid helium below its "Lambda Point", the temperature (1.2 Kelvins) at which it becomes a superfluid, a fluid with zero viscosity. It had just been predicted by Laszlo Tisza at MIT and by Kapitza in Russia that heat propagates like a sound wave in superfluid helium. I made the first measurement of the dependence of its propagation velocity on temperature. My partner from whom I learned the cryogenic technique was Robert Maurer, and my thesis supervisors were Melvin Herlin and John Slater.
I am also greatly indebted to Professor Samuel Collins who invented and built the cryostat that liquefied helium (at 4.2 Kelvins). Professor Gorter of Leiden University in Holland had previously enjoyed a monopoly in low temperature research because he was the only person who knew how to liquefy helium, in a very elaborate process that too many hours. When Gorter saw Sam Collin’s liquefier at a convention, he was outraged. "At Leiden we believe that a person must earn his right to do research at helium temperatures, and now every graduate student in the world will be able to do it." he is said to have exclaimed.
Another senior year event was a weekly evening seminar run by Professors Jerrold Zacharias and Al Hill in their homes for half a dozen outstanding seniors they had targeted as graduate students for their respective laboratories. John King and I were among them. We had stimulating discussions about unsolved problems in physics from elementary particles to quasars, and of course Schödinger’s molecular genetics.
(Continue to MIT Post Graduate)
Having been out of High School since 1942 and very rusty academically, I started intensive study of the college entrance exam guides while still in Washington during the winter of 1945, passed the exams in spring with grades high enough to be admitted to MIT in fall of 1946.
The class of ‘50 was famous for bulging with mature, world-wise, highly motivated and hard-working veterans supported by the GI Bill. Most were strongly opposed to president K.T. Compton’s advocacy of Universal Service because they thought it would perpetuate militarism. When Compton mounted the podium for his welcome speech. He looked over the thousand grim faces and said "Is there anyone here who thinks his military service made him militaristic?" Slowly a thousand smiles dissolved the tension. Compton outlined his vision of what later became President Kennedy’s Peace Corps.
After a few nights on a cot in the gymnasium and rush-week visits to several fraternity houses (which I didn’t like at all) I was assigned along with a thousand other freshmen to a cell in "building 22", now a temporary dorm, the former radiation laboratory where radar had been developed.
I had till spring to declare my major, and soon made a momentous decision. Maximum effort and no social life or piano for the first semester. I would test my talents against my freshman class mates (half of whom flunked out). If I did very well I would major in physics. If I did moderately well, electrical engineering. Even less well, mechanical and if mediocre civil engineering. To everybody’s surprise including my own, I was one of only two freshmen out of twelve hundred who finished the first semester with a cumulative grade of 5.0 out of a possible 5.0.
The die was cast, the oracle had spoken. I had become a legend. Even at my fiftieth reunion in 2000 I was greeted with "So you’re the guy who got a 5.0 cum the first semester!" I majored in Physics because I wanted to understand the universe and because it would open the doors to all branches of engineering, all of which are really just specialized applications of physics.
Even more important: I realized that I did not have to become a monomaniac (the word "nerd" had not yet been invented) to excel. I could lead a balanced life, pursue many interests, and still be the best.
Accordingly, I laid plans for a balanced undergraduate career during the spring semester.
I made friends with Phil Bagley, another serious pianist and a wealthy and very enterprising freshman too young to have served in the military. We agreed that he would buy a brand new Steinway concert grand and I would arrange to keep it in the basement studio of the MIT radio station and pay for monthly tuning and other maintenance. MIT didn’t own a single practice piano at the time.
I also availed myself of Phil’s dating service known as "Bagley’s Bags". His girl friend at Wellesley kept a 4x6 card file of available Wellesley student profiles which enabled Phil to offer his MIT friends pre-selected dates for a consideration (I said Phil was very enterprising), without the need to "pick a blind card" at an acquaintance dance. I dated two or three "bags", but found them to be too immature and just plain shallow to be worth spending my very limited time with.
Then I made friends with a group of classmates interested in general philosophy, and we had a hot chocolate club Friday nights to discuss everything from cosmology to biology, psychology and religion. They included Harry Parke, Doug Porter, John King, Fred Cann, and several whose names I don’t recall.
One of the most exciting events of the forties was the publication of a small booklet by Erwin Schrödinger, the Austrian physicist, called "What is Life?", a contribution all but forgotten. Schrödinger made the point that the human genome contained in every cell can only be encoded in a molecular structure because no other medium could come even close to storing the amount of information in the available volume, or with the incredibly reliable reproduction during mitosis. The rest is history. It took half a century for Crick and Watson to discover the genetic code. It is interesting that Watson mentioned Schrödinger’s book as an important inspiration when interviewed on a NOVA program in 2001.
Other important books we discussed were Arnold Toynbee’s "Study of History" and Bertrand Russel’s many essays, André Gide, and of course Einstein.
While exploring the basement one day in my freshman year I came upon the lab built in the thirties by Prof Francis Bitter where he was generating the world’s strongest magnetic fields. They were being used at the time to explore the quadratic Zeeman effect in the spectroscopy laboratory. Francis fed 2 megawatts (10,000 amps at 200 volts) into a helical magnet the size of an automobile tire cooled with 800 gallons per minute of water. The magnets were made of a stack of copper sheets. It was a tour de force I admired. Meeting Francis Bitter was a stroke of fate that affected my entire life. Francis became my mentor and collaborator. It is interesting that Francis’s father was the famous Austrian sculptor who set up a studio in New York in 1911 where he sculpted most of the statues in Central Park. More of Francis later.
I also made friends with the Department of Modern Languages, William Locke, head, and Barbara Fleming, secretary, and in particular Professor Fritjov Raven. Raven had gotten involved in doing technical translations, but really was not technically competent. He was more interested in philology. Fluent in Old Icelandic, Old High German, Sanscrit, Latin, Greek, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portugese, ("the first dozen are the hardest", he used to say). He was anxious to have me take over his translation service, and I certainly could use some money to supplement my GI Bill budget.
By summer vacation I had acquired a list of a dozen foreign students with assorted language and technical expertise, a bookshelf of technical dictionaries and handbooks, a Royal typewriter and a wire recorder (predecessor of the tape recorder). I dictated my translations as fast as I could read the originals and then typed them. Sometimes I had Babs Fleming do the typing . My clients included most of the Boston Patent Law firms, the Polaroid Corporation, then engaged in a patent battle with a Swiss inventor who had a more or less legitimate claim to Edwin Land’s instant photography process, and the US Navy Taylor Model Basin with which I had a contract to translate all of the German Navy’s secret technology. It was both very educational and lucrative, at two cents per word. The translation service, with much help from Elizabeth, provided discretionary income through graduate school and the early marriage years and into the building of Weir Meadow.
One of my later clients was a class mate named Bob Cesari who became a patent attorney. Cornelia married his nephew.
By the end of my first MIT summer I had made enough money to buy my first motorcycle, a Harley 125 cc two-stroke mini-bike. I took cold fall tours through the Green Mountains of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and a Thanksgiving visit to my parents in Philadelphia.
In retrospect I I marvel at how many activities I could manage. I obviously didn’t waste much time sleeping. In Edna St Vincent Millay’s words
Cut if you will, with Sleep’s dull knife,
Each day to half its length, my friend, -
The years that Time takes off my life,
He’ll take from the other end!
My sophomore year was even busier. In addition to running the MIT Translation Service and practicing piano regularly, I got Professor Struik’s permission to enroll in his graduate course in Tensor Analysis, not for credit. I needed it to understand general relativity. I also found a book on Galois Group Theory while browsing the Coop book store, and found it fascinating for its own sake.
MIT had hired Klaus Liepman, a German conductor and musicologist to bring musical culture to this trade school, and funded him to install a music library in the new Hayden library building. Suddenly we had eight sound-proof rooms with pianos for practicing and listening to records and a symphony orchestra. Liepman decided to include Mozart’s piano concerto Number twenty four in the grand opening performance during spring semester, and called for pianists to audition. I spent all of Christmas vacation practicing and auditioned, but lost to a German student named Michael Koerner. He was too young to have spent time in the Army and was clearly in better shape technically. I didn’t envy his victory, but I thoroughly resented his heavy-handed interpretation of Mozart.
At the same time an alumnus who was president of the Baldwin Organ Company donated a four-manual electric organ which was installed on the balcony of Walker Memorial auditorium. I got a key and permission to use it with earphones daytime, and with full speakers at night. Somehow I found time to practice the organ again, after my early instruction by the organist at Kenyon College (see chapter on military service).
The academic highlight was Professor Stockbarger’s sophomore lab course in which my team grew crystals during the fall semester, and measured the universal constant of gravitation during the spring semester. Despite all of this extracurricular activity I still managed to get very good grades.
Junior year I took Professor George Warren’s lab course in x-ray spectroscopy, Professor Slater’s course in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and in senior year Prof Bernard Feld’s course in Theoretical Physics and Hildebrand’s course in computation techniques (just before the digital age). In retrospect I marvel at how much I could fit into my schedule, while at the same time running the MIT Translation Service, and doing a very challenging bachelor thesis.
My bachelor thesis pursued my lifelong interest in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and my affinity for extremes and for challenging, leading-edge science. My objective was to measure so-called "second sound" in liquid helium below its "Lambda Point", the temperature (1.2 Kelvins) at which it becomes a superfluid, a fluid with zero viscosity. It had just been predicted by Laszlo Tisza at MIT and by Kapitza in Russia that heat propagates like a sound wave in superfluid helium. I made the first measurement of the dependence of its propagation velocity on temperature. My partner from whom I learned the cryogenic technique was Robert Maurer, and my thesis supervisors were Melvin Herlin and John Slater.
I am also greatly indebted to Professor Samuel Collins who invented and built the cryostat that liquefied helium (at 4.2 Kelvins). Professor Gorter of Leiden University in Holland had previously enjoyed a monopoly in low temperature research because he was the only person who knew how to liquefy helium, in a very elaborate process that too many hours. When Gorter saw Sam Collin’s liquefier at a convention, he was outraged. "At Leiden we believe that a person must earn his right to do research at helium temperatures, and now every graduate student in the world will be able to do it." he is said to have exclaimed.
Another senior year event was a weekly evening seminar run by Professors Jerrold Zacharias and Al Hill in their homes for half a dozen outstanding seniors they had targeted as graduate students for their respective laboratories. John King and I were among them. We had stimulating discussions about unsolved problems in physics from elementary particles to quasars, and of course Schödinger’s molecular genetics.
(Continue to MIT Post Graduate)