AM_F2019_01

There is supposed to be a difference between a graduate course and an undergraduate course. Don't tell anybody, there is no difference in this course, okay. The requirements are the same, but don't tell anybody. We're putting it on videotape from YouTube, so the whole world will know, but I'll deal with the undergraduate and graduate committees when they complain. I'm old enough they can complain all they want. I got ten years over the peers, okay.

The course started out essentially in my area. My specialty course in welding is a graduate course, and Chris Schuh, when he was head of the — he's now head of the department, but ten or fifteen years ago when he was head of the Graduate Committee, he came to me and said why don't you broaden it. And so we turned it in as a structural materials course, and you'll see there are some structural material modules. And then for a while it started becoming an online course. In fact, starting in the early '90s, I videotaped the course as an experiment for distance learning for MIT, and in fact it was the first — my course was the first time MIT ever gave credit at a distance to students that weren't on campus. That was in like 1991. And I learned that first year videotaping the courses was a great idea, because if you can't make it to a class and you were asking that question, then you can watch the movie, okay.

And so for the last twenty-five years I've been paying to videotape my classes, and my dean won't help me, okay. I do it because it makes it easier for me, makes it easier for you, and Giancarlo makes money, okay, as a graduate student. He's a starving graduate student, and other students due to different years — Brian Holman in the back was a graduate student with me, he used to videotape as a graduate student. Now he's been a practicing engineer for ten years and he will be one of the lecturers, because we have — we turned it into a modular course format.

I've gotten to the point in life where I just don't want to worry about what I teach. I just want to come and interact with the students and tell stories, okay. One of my postdocs catalogued that over a four-year period I told 453 stories, okay, in my classes. Okay, the stories are not just for fun. Most of them have some sort of purpose to them, and I think most students get that. A few students — I've had one or two students evaluate the course, "there's [what have you] Toby's stories." Other students say they like the stories. My favorite evaluation was the student who used to say that he watched the videos while he's fixing dinner, okay.

So one of the purposes of the course is to give you some experience in more of a real-world setting, okay. In my welding course I used to — I'm gonna solve one differential equation just to prove I'm an MIT professor, okay. I never do a derivation in class. Does anyone know why professors spend a whole hour doing a derivation in class and making mistakes? Yes — because they didn't prepare a lecture. Have you heard that before? Okay, yeah. Well, I learned it in my first or my second year as a faculty member. I'd been on a trip and I had to lecture in the course that was 3.37, this is back in the mid-1970s, and I hadn't prepared the lecture, and I looked in the book and there was a derivation. I thought, oh I can waste the time by doing this derivation. And all of a sudden the light went off. I thought, oh, that's why they waste our time doing derivations in class. And I promised myself that I would never do another derivation after that class, and I have not, okay, for over forty years, because it's a waste of time, okay. And that's what they're doing — they're just wasting time filling up the time.

I would rather answer your questions and fill up the time rather than do a lecture. Now the problem with that is, if you were undergraduates and I was still teaching thermo, I would have to prepare you for the quiz. If the quiz is in two days and I haven't covered one of the topics that I already wrote the questions for, it doesn't matter if you ask a question, I'm gonna ignore you and I'm going to lecture so that everybody gets what they need for the quiz, right. And I realized that's stupid too, okay. That's not teaching, that's prepping for quizzes, and we'll talk about that a little bit. So over the years I've come to the conclusion that the way we teach in general is garbage, and I've been teaching my own way ever since.

So there's three lectures — I will teach between six and ten lectures this year. Dr. Simone Belmar, who is a graduate of this department and is a mechanical engineer as an undergraduate and got a doctoral degree in fatigue and fracture and as a practicing engineer starting his own company, is going to — we'll talk about what he's going to talk about, actually, for starting a company. And Brian Holman, who was my last doctoral student, who worked on non-destructive testing for his doctoral thesis, is going to talk about non-destructive testing. And Brian will be the TA. And I guess I should have put on here Jerry Hills, my assistant, and so if you have questions you can talk to her. So let's go. What's it doing?

[Tom fumbles with the projector.] Oh well, why doesn't it want to index. Hmm, okay. Whatever, he didn't like the old mode. Oh well, who cares.

So there's a sign-in sheet that I passed around. That's what I will go off of, who's in class. And Jerry's my assistant, right down here on 4-138 down the hall. It became an online class, and the problem because I videotaped — a lot of students would have the same problem you got: they can't make some of the nine o'clock classes. Well, no one likes to come to nine o'clock classes, and as it gets to — when we're in daylight savings time, nobody wants to get up for a nine o'clock class. So you're gonna see that I'm gonna schedule all the lectures during the month of September, but you only have to attend six lectures out of the whole month, okay. And we're gonna finish up most of the work by November, so when all your other courses are starting to pile on the work at the end of the semester, you can essentially be done with this course, okay.

So it became an online course, and I couldn't really tell who was in the class. We got to the point we didn't even have a lot of people listening to the lectures. I had guest lectures. It was a little bit of embarrassment, okay. So now you have to come to six lectures and we will keep attendance, okay. And last semester about two or three students ended up dropping the course at the end because they were like five lectures behind in attending lectures, okay. I don't know if they did other things, but you know, it's not that hard to attend a few lectures, okay. They'll be flexibly scheduled and I don't care which lecture or recitation you attend, because we all sort of tell stories and case studies and it doesn't really matter. You're not going to be quizzed, you're gonna find out, okay.

And we will schedule some for those of you — if there is anybody who cannot, who thinks they couldn't make six during the month of September nine o'clock lectures, so we may not have to do it, but even so, you're going to be watching other videos from lectures of previous years. And in October, in November, we will schedule a couple of classes just for recitations so you can come and ask us questions, okay. So I'm not just going to dump you at the end of September, but we're going to videotape things at the beginning and then you get to watch the movies later.

Class schedule will be arranged. Well, if you look on the — we'll get to that, this is at the end of this. I put it in because of travel schedules of all the three of us. This is my only lecture this week, but I'll do two next week and three the next week. You'll see the schedule, and it's also on Stellar, okay. Normal extra time is nine to ten, sometimes we might have one at 10:00 a.m., but if all of you could make this nine o'clock time for six lectures we don't even have to do that. But we did that last year. You are going to have to write a paper. The Institute requires me to grade each of you individually, which means you have to do some individual work, okay.

But the theme is flexibility in a stress-free environment, and somehow I got into a mode button-pushing. I try to be flexible and take away the stress. You don't need stress as seniors and graduate students, okay. As a graduate student, I remember as a graduate student I was so sick of taking quizzes. I mean, what do I need to take a quiz for? What was I proving at that point? I was already in graduate school, okay. I didn't need to take quizzes. I'd learned to take quizzes throughout my life, okay.

There are a bunch of modules. I wish I knew how to toggle this back. Yeah, but the — that's not on my screen. Oh, that's so when I hit before. Maybe if I go to the top. Yeah, you mean down at the bottom. Oh, where — oh, I did on the side. The mast — it's not, it's nothing's appearing on this screen. Oh, okay, hey, good. No, not that one. Which one? This one? Thank you, I'm glad you know how to do this. You're younger than I am, so you know how. Okay.

The available modules — if you go to eager.mit.edu [eagar.mit.edu] you'll see some of the modules. If I go backwards, I've done: what is total quality management, I'm officially a professor of engineering materials and engineering management, and I actually took some courses at Sloan. They consider me an alum, an alum for fundraising purposes. Material selection, welding metallurgy, solid-state welding — I do those during the summer when I have US Navy students here. What is engineering: at one time, in 2015, I had always wondered what's the difference between a scientist and an engineer, so I did an experiment. I taught twelve lectures on engineering, and I came up with a list of what is the difference between scientists and engineers. If you want, we could go through that some time. Codes and standards: I've taught it twice, but I actually think it's an important course, but the students don't care for it much. They think it's kind of dull, but I deal with it all the time. Deformation processing, which is rolling, forging, and things like that, drawing of sheet metal, materials processing casting, material selection and economics, which is different than the material selection. And then if you go to what Dr. Belmar's taught in the years: materials processing, structural materials — remember, he's a structural mechanical behavior type of person — structural life assessment. So there's all kinds of modules. Most of them have about six units, six classes, six lectures.

There's also Neil Jenkins, who was one of my students who went off after his PhD and got an MD. One time when I was on sabbatical he did a dozen lectures on how a medical doctor examines you when you walk in. He uses all five senses. He smells, and if you've got garlic breath that may be a certain type of disease, okay. So anything they've touched and they feel and all this other stuff, he goes through. If you're interested in medicine, it's sort of a material scientist's view of the medical profession and how general practitioners examine, okay.

And then Steve Lyons is a graduate of Sloan, he's a practicing attorney, has his own law firm in Boston. I've known him for about seven or eight years and he's argued in front of the Supreme Court four or five times, okay. He's a patent attorney. He thinks that students should learn intellectual property, so every spring — MIT, again, they will not support him, they will but he comes over on his own. He also has bagels on Fridays, okay, that he brings in his own expense. He just enjoys interacting with the students, and so the students have loved his modules on law and technology, which is basically intellectual property. So if you want to start a business or if you think you're going to invent something, it's a worthwhile module. And it's actually a double module in that it's twelve lectures.

What do you have to do — twelve lectures? What do you have to watch — 36 lectures. If you go look at any other 12-unit course there's about 36 lectures. So you can take six six-unit modules, you can take three twelve-unit modules, you can take whatever combination as long as it turns out that you either attend or watch 36 lectures. You can mix and match any way you want even between modules, although I don't know how — that, well, actually the way I — I'm just telling stories, problem is you might hear the same story twice. But anyway, you see if the answer is the same at the end of the story.

Prepare a one-page outline of each lecture or module. Why do you do that? A professor can only get one or two ideas across in a one-hour lecture, okay. They might hit fifteen different topics, but there's really just one or two themes. And what happened to me as a junior — for whatever reason, I took an elective in the physics department called Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, and I had Vera Kistiakowsky [Kistiakowski], okay. Now, Vera was — I think she might have been the first woman full professor in physics at MIT, and her father had won the Nobel Prize at Harvard in chemistry. And Vera was a wonderful lecturer, but I didn't have a clue what's going on in that class. I was getting 15 or 20 out of 100 on the homework, so when everybody else was averaging 85 I didn't have a clue. And so the night before the final I figured I'm gonna flunk this stupid course. I'm just gonna go through the textbook, I'm gonna pick out the high points, and I'll go in there and do whatever I do. Well, I went in, I finished a three-hour final in an hour and twenty minutes, checked it over in another twenty minutes, walked out, and got an A in the course. And all of a sudden a big light went off — you mean all that stuff they talk about in class is just fluff, okay. There's only one or two themes, and if you can figure out the theme, then you know what the lecture is all about.

And so for the rest of my career at MIT, from first term — that was first term junior year — all the way through graduate school, I never took another note in class, okay. I didn't worry about quizzes. I just at the end of the class I'd say, can I write down in one or two sentences what this lecture was all about, and I summarized it. And I found that's a very valuable thing, not just in taking lectures but going into a meeting and afterward saying what was this meeting all about. And sometimes the answer is, nothing, it was a waste of time in that meeting, okay. But nonetheless, I read things and I say okay can I summarize it.

So I basically want you, as part of this class, to learn how to summarize one hour of talking into a sentence or two. So you're going to watch 36 lectures, and they'll probably end up being about three pages long at the end of the semester. After every lecture, write down what you think that lecture was about. And I tell you that, one of the things I've learned from this — if you write down, if you watch a lecture and you write down what you think is about, and he watches the same lecture and writes nothing — they're not similar at all. But because each of you, the important thing you get out of the lecture is related to your prior experience, okay. So that's okay, you're internalizing what the lecture is about, and that's the purpose of that exercise. Not a lot of work, you got to watch the lecture anyway. Takes you two minutes at the end to write it down, put it on your computer. At the end you're gonna have to submit it. Some students do big long things, I don't want a big long thing, I have to review it, or Brian has to review it, okay. Just keep it simple, okay. You don't have to figure out what this lecture is about because it doesn't really have a theme other than what's required.

So a one-page outline on the 36 — well, a two or three line for all 36 lectures and what the two or three themes for that one lecture. Prepare a 10-page paper on a materials topic of your choice. We're going to go into that in some detail. Review, but don't edit. Just like you're reviewing a technical publication, review it and say, well, I think you have not proven X, can you elaborate, okay. You don't have to rewrite it for them. That's not your job as an editor of a paper that's been submitted to a journal. You just critique it and say, you need to strengthen this point, or this is extraneous, get rid of this figure, you know, whatever, or put in such-and-such a figure.

So we're gonna assign you at the beginning — in November, three or four papers — or, no, you're going to be assigned a paper, and three or four students are going to review each one of your papers, okay. Each one of you have three or four other students in the class. And that's one of the reasons — one of the things you're gonna have to do, if I didn't say it already, is you're gonna have to tell us what your topics are by — it'll get there, when are we within — by the end of this month, actually sooner than that. Ten pages maximum. I don't want big long papers, I'm not trying to get a 30-page paper. If you actually think about it, you need to spend about ten hours putting this paper together. And if you pick a topic you already know — some people pick a topic that was your thesis, okay. So if you'd worked on it previously.

One of the ones I really liked, a few years ago I actually had two students who were pole vaulters in the class, and they did papers on how you design a pole vault pole, which is really interesting actually, by the way. And I want sources, okay. I don't want how the automotive company builds cars, it's a little broad, okay. I want something that could — like the pole vaulting pole was perfect. How do you design a fiberglass pole vault pole? It has different stiffnesses along the length. And, you know how they do — anybody know how you do it? Instead of rolling up the fiberglass in a jelly roll like this, you roll it like this from a corner. And if you think about it, you've got more layers in the middle than you do on the ends, which is exactly what you want in the stiffness of a pole vault pole, okay. And you see these poles bending 180 — more than 180 degrees — because they're really strong, flexible fiberglass with many layers in the middle. Not particularly magic or rocket science, but it's basically just how you lay up something, which was interesting. I'd never thought about it before, okay.

Example topics can be Japanese sword smithing. Some students were interested in these — they had to actually made their own swords, not as part of this course, but it was something they were doing with Mike Tarkanian. Someone was interested in the material and why the Titanic broke up, which is brittle fracture. Some people are nuclear engineers and they were interested in some of the materials in nuclear power plants. You got to focus that down a little bit more because there's a lot of materials in nuclear power plants. Materials from pole-vaulting — there, I talked about that. Your papers — best if you pick a topic that you're interested in.

One student did a few years ago, ancient — not ancient, but antique — doorknobs. If you go to Europe and you look at a 500, 800-year-old building, there'll be these ornate cast and wrought doorknobs, okay. And they were just, for whatever reason, they were interested in that, and so they did a paper on doorknobs, okay. I don't care, I mean I like to read about these things, okay. So any material topic you wish. Ten pages double-spaced, don't be too general, don't be too broad, don't try to cover too much. Add your own analysis and opinions, okay. I'm interested in what you think. You don't have to be right, but I want to know what you think about things.

So the requirements of the course, here we go. Summarized A through F. No quizzes, no finals, okay. Submission of a proposed paper topic — you got twelve days. I want to know what your paper topics are. If you say you're going to talk about designing of automobiles, I'm going to reject it as too broad, okay. If you say you want to talk about designing of a carbon-fiber automobile like the BMW i3 — probably still pretty broad, but a student did it and did a great job on it, but it's partly because they've been studying it for some time, and they did a great job because it wasn't something they just did ten hours on, they probably done thirty hours before, and they talked about something they were interested in, okay. That's fine.

No issue of collusion, so this whole integrity thing that I'm supposed to tell you about — I told you about it. You can go to the Integrity at MIT and it will talk to you about don't plagiarize, don't cheat. How can you cheat if there's no quizzes, okay. I kind of took that away, right? There's no issue of collusion, you can talk to each other, okay. You'll be evaluated on your paper.

Paper is due November 1st in final form, okay. Final form, meaning it's going to go to three or four other people to review just before Thanksgiving. They're going to have marked it up. You can use Microsoft Word in edit mode or whatever, make comments about "I didn't understand this sentence" or "this paragraph" or "elaborate here" or "cut this out" or whatever. You're gonna have to, and then give that back to the student. Those edits are not coming to Brian or myself. Those are going to the other students that are reading your paper, okay. Your final papers are gonna be due on 12/6, which means you take those comments and you get to spend Thanksgiving editing those and turning them in. Oh, actually you have about two weeks, okay. That's actually before the last day of class. What does everything do? It's due the last day of class. But again, I'm trying to get you done with this course, and really, if you've done your paper and watched your modules by November 1st it's not a whole lot to do in November and early December, okay.

Completion of one-page outlines — let's do when you finish watching the modules, hopefully by December 6th. And attend six live lectures, okay. That's it. Any problems? Okay, I've now done that.

We also have — well, many students say they learn a lot from reading the other students' papers. I learned a lot from reading the students' papers. That's one of the things that makes the class enjoyable. That's where I get some of my stories sometimes, okay.

So I'll now talk a little bit about my teaching philosophy. Too much of our educational approach is geared towards helping students take tests. And the way I learned this — I tend to get up about 4:30 in the morning, and I usually dress in the dark, and I go downstairs, and I can turn the kitchen light on so I don't have to eat in the dark. But one time twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago, I was sitting there eating my cereal or whatever at the kitchen table, and one of my children left their high school math book on the table. And so I thought, okay, the paper hadn't come yet or whatever, and I started flipping through the math book. That math book had two pages on exponentials, two pages on differentials, two pages on integration, two pages on factorials. I had no idea that mathematics came in two-page lumps, okay, increments. And I thought, all they're doing is prepping them to take the SAT, okay. They're not teaching the math, okay. They're prepping them to answer a few, as you noted, relatively simple questions. They didn't seem relatively simple to you when you were taking the SAT, but they weren't really getting into the depth of things.

Yeah, I thought, that's stupid, okay. And I started thinking about, well, we do the same thing at MIT, just a different form, and we put a lot of pressure on the students for the quizzes. Why are we doing that? You wouldn't be here if you didn't know how to take quizzes. You wouldn't have been admitted, okay. The other thing is, this course is not required for anything. Seniors, yeah, you got to get a grade, but no one's really been that disappointed in their grade — although I'll tell you now that I require attendance at some of the lectures, there have been some students that didn't get the grade they had hoped for. But it wasn't that they weren't told, you're gonna actually have some requirements, and Brian and I will hold you to the requirements. Brian is a real stickler for some of these things anyway.

But I'm trying to do it in a stress-free environment, because I remember what it was like to be an MIT student, and you don't need that stress. Ninety-five percent of the stress at MIT, whether you're a faculty member or a student, is self-inflicted. You put the pressure on yourself. That's not all bad necessarily. And in fact, there are a number of articles, if you're looking for some things to read aside from watching my stories on Stellar, there's MIT Faculty Newsletter that I wrote back — boy, this was 2004, so fifteen years ago — on what is the essence of MIT. I wrote this after I'd been here nearly forty years as a student and as a faculty member, and I came up with five things that make MIT unique from all other schools. Is there maybe Caltech? Okay, but Caltech is just a spin-off. You guys know that, right? Does anybody know that story?

So what happened is, there's a guy named Arthur Amos Noyes who was one of the greatest physical chemists in the United States. He had headed the MIT chemistry department. He had studied in Germany, because back then around the turn of the 20th century, every — all the great scientists had to go to Germany to study science, that's where all the quantum mechanics gurus were and stuff. In fact, if you look at the MIT curriculum from the 1880s and 1890s, you were required to take German because it was the language of science, and all the important papers were written in German, okay. So Noyes went to Germany, he came back, he was the greatest physical chemist, and he became president of MIT.

And it turns out there was another guy called Walker, William Walker — you ever heard of Walker Memorial over here? Okay. William Walker sort of, along with another guy called Arthur D. Little, which you probably haven't heard of too much anymore — but Arthur D. Little, in the 1880s, graduated from MIT and founded a big consulting firm, like McKinsey or something, called Arthur D. Little, okay. And Arthur D. Little and William Walker helped start what's called the Chemical Engineering Practice School and defined the whole field of chemical engineering. And the Practice School — anybody know what the Practice School is in chemical engineering? It's been going for over a hundred years. It's one of the real innovations in MIT education. They take teams of master's students and send them to company sites for like six weeks at a time to solve a problem as a team. And after they've done this for a whole year, they bring them back and turn them into PhD students. But the chemical engineering Practice School is a great experience builder, and you actually have a faculty member who lives on site, you know, in Texas or wherever, some oil company or whatever with you. Now they do pharmaceutical companies and other things.

But Walker believed that education should involve real practice. In that sense, he and William Barton Rogers, who founded MIT, believed mens et manus, okay — mind and hand. You have to get in there and do things, okay. But Noyes thought, no, you should be a pure academic, okay. And — I quote in the beginning here from a guy named Edison — December 1911, Thomas Edison wrote, "There is no question but that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the best technical institution in the country. I have found the graduates of Tech to have a better, more practical, more usable knowledge as a class than the graduates of any other school in the country. The salvation of America lies in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." Oh, okay. So you can — hopefully that'll encourage you to read some more of that article about what makes MIT unique.

Well, it turns out, they had a big war between Noyes and Walker. Walker won, and the faculty decided we need to have practical education. So Noyes left MIT. He stopped in Cleveland along the way, or maybe Chicago, and met a guy named Millikan. Anyone ever heard of Millikan? The oil-drop experiment, second Nobel Prize in Physics in the United States. And the two of them went out to Pasadena, California, and they took over this little school called through Institute of Technology. They renamed it Caltech. And what's the mascot of Caltech? It's the beaver. What are the colors of Caltech? Maroon and grey. Does it sound familiar? You know, we used to call maroon and grey "blood on concrete," okay. Hey, you know, each class has its own.

Anyway, the stress that we feel around here is self-inflicted. Good teaching, on the other hand, makes things simple rather than complex. How many professors actually get up and sort of pontificate and try to explain to you how complex the subject is? That's — I'm sorry, that's — if they really understand it, they should be able to simplify it so that you can understand it. You're not that dumb, okay. You're actually in the top on the order of one out of 10,000 academically in the country, so they ought to be able to teach it to you, okay.

So my philosophy is, I want to try to teach you what you already know, just how to put it together. I think all those years as an undergraduate, or as an undergraduate somewhere else and now a graduate student, you've learned all the tools. You know what Fick's law of diffusion is, or Fourier's [for EA's] first law or something like that, but they never tell you how to use it. I used to say, when I taught thermo, MIT students can calculate the heat engine up one side down the other but they can't tell you how an air conditioner works, okay. Well, an air conditioner, by the way, is a heat engine, okay. And if you really understand an air conditioner, you understand why the big ones are expensive, because they have a smaller delta-T between the heat exchanger and — it all comes out of the efficiency of the heat exchanger, a heat engine, okay. But they never teach you that because they're just prepping you for an exam.

So anyway, the syllabus — if you go on the web, and actually we sent to those pre-registered a copy of a letter that I wrote that basically says what we have. We're going to have three modules. I will be teaching one on additive manufacturing. I have up here some additive manufacturing parts. [Tom holds up sample parts.] These are things that I made by high-energy electron beam about twenty-five years ago. That's made out of — that was supposed to be a way for the US Navy to build propellers, because that's a manganese aluminum bronze which is what they build propellers out of. This is a piece of stainless steel, and you can see the defects that form. This is a piece of Inconel. Okay, those are all things that we made twenty-five years ago.

Today there's a company called Digital Alloys that has developed a high-speed process — and this is a titanium part, and they're making these types of parts, which is just a rod of titanium. Be careful, it looks like the World Trade Center if you're standing on — and it might collapse. Anyway, in any case, they're making them for Boeing, and Boeing wants them to make a few thousand so they can qualify them for parts. Now they're going to machine it into a special part.

If you go down the hall here — I stole these from Mike Tarkanian, sent him an email that I'd stolen them — these are demos from Desktop Metals, which is the startup which is just literally a quarter mile down the road from Digital Alloys that makes that. And they use a powder bed process, and that is — the problem with powder bed process, it's 50 percent void, and so it shrinks by 50 percent when you densify it. The problem with that is it leaves behind defects, so if you look on that broken piece you'll see the defects.

In any case, there's a guy at Digital Alloys who wrote ten blogs which are going to be your text from my part of the course, and he will come in at the end of September and we'll have him talk to you, okay. But also, if you watch "Eagar Spring 2016 Structural Materials Lecture 2 of 2" [Eagar Spring 2015] on YouTube — which if you go to my website there'll be a link, you don't have to watch the introduction again for the first six and a half minutes, but if you watch that — MIT Technology Review asked me two weeks before class, why don't we do additive manufacturing of metals? And I talked to them for two hours about, well, we have been, we've been doing it for a hundred years, but we don't, because there are a lot of technical problems. You can only do it in certain cases.

So this course is going to be: what's good about additive manufacturing, what's bad about additive manufacturing, and is it really going to be this great promise of new manufacturing of the future. The bottom line is, no, it won't, okay. But it does have some niche applications. Innovation versus technical startups: Simone Belmar has started a company that does non-destructive testing to measure the strength of pipelines. We have a half-million miles of pipelines in this country, and the federal government wants to know if they're worth keeping in service after fifty years. That's probably a trillion-dollar investment that the oil companies and others have, and they don't want to lose their investment because the federal government deregulates them, okay. So he's going to talk about the things he's learned in starting that company, which is starting to be successful.

And Dr. Holman — Brian, you want to talk about what about penetration?

[Brian Holman speaks, inaudible / not captured in transcript, ~40:24–41:03.]

So my module is really related towards practical applications. Discusses new techniques that were discussed in my thesis that are healthy [helpful]. So if you want to learn about how to inspect things, Brian's going to talk about the latest and greatest techniques.

The schedule — so this is on Stellar, but yesterday was — or Monday was Labor Day, yesterday was registration day, I'm giving you the intro today, Brian will be giving his first lecture tomorrow, Simone Belmar will be here on Friday. And Simone will be doing Monday, I'll be doing two lectures, one Tuesday and Wednesday, on 3D printing additive manufacturing, Brian will do a couple. I would suggest, if you want to focus on any one of these — for mine, you go to that spring of 2015 lecture, second lecture on structural materials, and watch that hour, that would give you a background. And then there's also on the web, or on Stellar, there's the list of the ten blogs. And these are just written blogs about things like the economics of metal additive manufacturing, and he talks about — there's twenty different processes that are out there, and he contrasts and compares them, and I think it's a fair assessment, okay, of what's out there.

Okay. I get questions, asked questions all the time about additive manufacturing, so I decided, well, I might as well — since Alex put this together in the past year, we might as well do a module. And then here's the rest of the schedule through — and it turns out we'll finish up on the last day of September if all goes well, we don't have snowstorms or anything else, okay.

And then just this one's probably not that necessary. Treated — any questions, so come to class, ask questions. I would rather answer your question than give a lecture, okay. I'm warned, now, recitation mode. I like passed-around touchy-feelies. There are other things on Stellar right now if you want to read things. There's an article that I wrote about six weeks after the World Trade Center collapsed, and I was so sick of reading things in the paper that were just outright wrong, okay, about the collapse of the World Trade Center. People said, oh, the fire was so hot it melted the steel. If you could melt steel that easily we didn't need Henry Bessemer in the 1860s to teach us how to melt steel, okay. You don't melt steel in any type of building fire. I mean, I've seen oil rigs where you have a 60-foot flame — I can show you a video, actually, of a 60-foot flame in an oil rig and the thing lasts four hours. And finally it collapses, not because the steel melted, because it just got so hot, so weak, it just falls over like it's cooked spaghetti, okay.

So what happened is, there's another professor who was asked to write an article by a journal editor — journal Metals editor — and he said, ask Tom Eagar. So I took it on, and I wrote this article, and I sometimes describe it as "what you can say about something when you know nothing about a subject," okay. This has become, out of hundreds of publications, the most referenced publication I've ever written. It took three hours of my time to research it and write it, okay. And it became, for nine years, if you Googled "WTC collapse" I was the number-one hit. Everybody was reading this. I'd go to Washington and all of a sudden I was the expert. In the fall of 2000 — actually it didn't come out until December — but in 2002, early 2002, people in Washington considered me the expert on the WTC collapse. I'd spent three hours studying it. Mm, okay.

And then starting about that same time, the truthers — anybody know what the truthers are? Eighteen percent of this country believed that the government brought down the World Trade Center towers. It's a conspiracy. And at first they said, here, this paper is wrong, because he says you can't melt steel, any firefighter who's ever been to a fire knows that you don't melt steel in a fire. You didn't need me to say that. But they said, here's an idiot. And then about three years later they actually wrote a book, which I think I have somewhere in my office, where it said Eagar's an idiot because the fire only got to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Excuse me, you can't even cook a good pizza in that fire. And so, when I was teaching thermo at the time, I gave that book like two or three pages of some calculation. The person didn't put his name on the chapter, which is good, he would have gotten an F in my thermo course. And he calculated heat transfer into the concrete slab, and he determined that there was not going to be enough heat to get that concrete slab to more than 500 degrees. That's because he didn't think about thermal conductivity, and in an hour's time you can't heat four inches of concrete. You only get surface heating, okay. But they didn't realize that, okay.

So I used to hand it out — any student who can figure out what the error is in this calculation can get a pass on the first homework assignment. And actually there were only three or four students who took the challenge, but all of them figured it out, okay. The error was not that hard to find. Anyway, there's a number of articles, if you're interested in structural materials. The article I wrote for National Research Council Committee on Materials Research for the 21st Century — and I disagreed with almost everybody on the committee, and so they put my four pages as an appendix at the end. But what I did is, I took my structural materials course and I took the notes home, and I outlined the entire course in four pages. So if you want to know what I'm going to say about structural materials, it's right here, in four pages, okay.

There's some other things in here, like — Tufte talks about PowerPoint, okay. I'm not a big fan of PowerPoint, although I use it, but he hates PowerPoint. But if you want to read the Gettysburg Address in seven PowerPoints, it's in here, okay. And it goes in bullet form: "Not on a — dedicate, consecrate, hallow," adage attract not note or remember what we say. I mean, you can take a great piece of American prose and turn it into pure drivel with PowerPoint, okay. That was when I used to have — the students used to have a communication requirement as part of this course, but it got to be too many students and so we don't do it anymore. So there are some sort of fun things in there. I don't remember if I still have the Air Force squawks, but they may be in there.

So any other — any questions? I'm always better if you ask me questions, anyway. Okay, we'll see you tomorrow. You're lecturing tomorrow, a sure ism — [aphorism] — is not encouraged, and Brian's excellent at figuring it out.