§1. Presentation logistics [00:00]
The presentations should be about ten minutes, which means no more than ten overheads. In general it's a very good rule, one minute per overhead. Not too broad. I don't want to solve world hunger, or how to make an automobile — that's a little too broad. How to build a 747 is a little broad. But if you want to get down to the problem of distortion on the longerons, which are the beams in the 747, that's a good topic. I could give you the ten-minute dissertation on that right now because I've been involved in it.
State what the problem is. That's one overhead. The other nine are basically what's the solution. Things students have done: pole-vaulting poles — one year I had two students do pole-vaulting poles, and it's an interesting composite material, has to be very flexible, has to be very strong, has to be very light. Tennis racquets. Gothic arches like the flying buttresses on cathedrals from 800 years ago in Europe. Sailing hardware. I don't want how to build an America's Cup yacht — that's too complex. But you could have, like one of my lectures, the failure of a 7,500 psi hydraulic cylinder that failed and how we had to design it to fail safe. Another student was interested in bayonets. Anything you want, because if it's of interest to you you'll do a good job.
I'm not opposed to, and I don't consider it cheating if, you come in and give a presentation on your internship that you did this summer. There's nothing that says you can't. I just want a presentation from you about something you're interested in. I've had students do things similar to a presentation they gave in another class or a UROP project. But you've got to get it down to ten minutes. A lot of these other presentations might be half-hour presentations, so you've got to summarize it and pick some little piece you can do well. State the problem and then tell about the solution. You don't always have to have a solution. It may be a problem without a solution yet and you just want to present the paradox and see what the class has to say. There's nothing wrong with that.
By the end of this month hopefully registration for the class will have settled down, since it's open-ended. You don't even have to come to class. I get students all the way into October who want to join the class, which is actually okay. They just have to watch a bunch of videos. But I will then start to schedule some of the presentations. And I assume some of you have a presentation like your internship. I don't care. Why does it have to be different? I actually think it's better if you say this is something I did. From an ethical point of view you ought to disclose what your sources are.
§2. Plagiarism, attribution, and full disclosure [04:09]
Look at the vice president at Wheelock. I've been reading about it in the paper. The vice president — who's like the provost of that little university over in the Fenway — had a welcome letter to the faculty this month, only she plagiarized from Drew Faust's 2007 letter to her faculty at Harvard, and a few other faculty. It was all over the front pages of the Globe this past week. She's resigned now for plagiarism. Someone, as the article said, asked: was it really plagiarism because she wasn't being graded on it like students? Wait a second — I never heard that plagiarism only occurred on assignments in the classroom. This is a little twist some academic is trying to put on anything. Plagiarism is plagiarism.
We're in an engineering class. There's nothing wrong with using someone else's good idea — you can present it as long as you attribute it to the person you got it from. I spent a year in Yokohama, my first sabbatical in Japan, and Japanese steel technology is used all over the world, because you'd be stupid not to use the best technology. Some people consider it stealing. It depends. It is stealing if it's patented. But the Japanese aren't necessarily stealing patented technology. They would say they're using the best technology and you're foolish not to use it. On the other hand, the scientists and the people in the arts and sciences are going to want it to be unique. You can't just redo Mozart and claim it as your own. I understand that. But if you have a bridge design that works, why do you need to build one that doesn't? It's just full disclosure. Don't hide things. That's what you get in trouble for — hiding things. If Barry Bonds had told people he was on performance-enhancing drugs he wouldn't have hit seventy-three home runs, but he would have been playing. That's another story.
§3. MIT and the engineering-industry partnership [06:20]
The summary from last time: engineering as a discipline has evolved dramatically in the last 150 years, and MIT has been at the forefront of defining engineering as a partnership between academia and industry. We have more patents than any other university in the country except the University of California system — meaning all the universities in California have more patents than us. We have more than Berkeley or any other single campus. We have more research money from industry than any other university in the country. We are sort of the leaders. There have been studies looking at the spin-offs of MIT. There's twenty billion dollars a year of business in Massachusetts or New England that comes out of MIT spin-offs. There's about eighty billion in Silicon Valley. Stanford gets a lot of credit, and they should get a lot of credit. You just have Google — well, you've got a big chunk right there. If you have Facebook, Harvard's got something there. But MIT is sort of the incubator, and a lot of people know that.
Student: [asks about the Cambridge-MIT program]
The Cambridge-MIT program started fifteen years ago or so with British government funds. The Chancellor of the Exchequer — who's like the Secretary of the Treasury, in the office of the Prime Minister of Britain — announced it. It was initially a hundred-million-dollar program. Why would they do that, and why did they pick MIT? Because we're the best. The Singapore University Alliance is over 200 million now. And some of you are from Skolkovo, the Russian institute set up by some very wealthy businessman. If you've got a lot of money, you come to MIT. Sometimes they go to Stanford, sometimes other places. There's only half a dozen schools that really get these things, and MIT has more than its share, because we're the technological leaders. That's one of the things I want to talk about today.
I mentioned the academics in the arts and sciences often look down on engineering. I gave you the quote from Francis Amasa Walker, the president of MIT in 1911, where he says engineers have too long been thought of by other academics in the arts and sciences as having attained their accomplishments by some lower intellectual merit. I gave you the von Kármán quote: a scientist explains that which exists, and an engineer creates that which never was. There was also a quote that scientists like to create new knowledge, things we didn't understand before. An engineer actually likes to put things together from existing pieces. They don't have to invent new things. Like the guy with the medical instrument where we ended up using anodized aluminum — anodized aluminum wasn't new. It's just a new application for it, in the medical application where they were using lasers. And we got a patent on it. I never got anything for it actually. I got my hourly consulting rate, which was about four hours. Doesn't take long to come up with an idea that's patentable. The Johnson & Johnson people spent a lot more time on it.
So there's this hierarchy of snobbery, and it goes the other way too. The engineers look down on the scientists because the scientists aren't doing something useful. Engineers take pride in doing something of benefit to society. The scientists don't care about society so much. They just want to create new knowledge even if it's just for another five scientists in the world who can understand what they're doing. But engineers like to do things on a large scale.
§4. Goldman Sachs and career changes [11:11]
Let me also tell you something else: Goldman Sachs people are slobs. We came in here, the room was a mess. [Tom indicates the papers and rearranged chairs left in the lecture hall.] It turns out some people from Goldman Sachs came here and started teaching students how to do resumés last night, and they left the place a mess. If someone had come to your house and just left a bunch of paper flying all over, moved the chairs and everything else, and just walked out, you would call them pigs or slobs. So here is proof. They left all this stuff. It's Goldman Sachs. This is Goldman's check — GoldmanSachs.com/engineering — which is what we're about. Solve complex problems — and that's what we've been saying engineering is all about. So if you want to be an engineer, you can go work for Goldman Sachs. And here are the notes from the Goldman Sachs person, which they just left here on the table. Telling people how to write resumés, leadership and maturity. It'd be good if their people had enough maturity to clean up after themselves. So it's now on the internet, or it will be within twenty-four hours. If anybody asks you about Goldman Sachs, go see Professor Eagar's fourth lecture on What Is Engineering and he will tell you about Goldman Sachs.
Which brings me to another story. I always have stories. One of my classmates as an undergraduate went off to Stanford Business School, got hired by Goldman Sachs, went off to Southern California, became a broker for Goldman Sachs, became a partner. He was making nearly a million bucks a year. This was in the early 1980s. He finally decided when he was about thirty or thirty-two he couldn't continue. He went to his billion-dollar clients, had lunch with them to explain he was going to move back to Boston, go to Harvard School of Public Health, get a doctorate in preventive medicine. They asked him why. He said, well, I don't really feel that just managing your money is really that helpful. Every one of the clients he talked to said, I wish I had your guts to do something like that. It was a career change, and it was hard for him to get a job because his idea about preventive medicine was kind of ahead of the time. He's doing okay now. He went down to work with Dr. DeBakey, the heart surgeon in Texas, and he's still in Texas. For a while there before he finished his thesis, he had to get a job as a math teacher in the Dallas high schools. I had to write a recommendation letter saying this graduate of MIT actually could teach high school math. I could write that recommendation letter, but why do they need this in the Dallas high schools? You can probably look at his degree — I bet he could handle high school math.
§5. Course recap and the scope question [14:29]
I put on the web a brief history of engineering — I wrote this up back in 2005 for a group of students, and I put that on the web too. Now let's get to it. It always takes me fifteen minutes to get to where we're going. We have these questions that I gave you the first day. What is engineering? Hopefully you have some idea now of how to define your definition of engineering. It might still change over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully you have a feel for the difference between science and engineering. You have a feel for the snobbery — just like MIT and Harvard go at it, the scientists and the engineers go at it. Same type of trying to patch up your ego from the slurs the other side gives. I'm sure Goldman Sachs will be trying to patch up their ego.
How old is engineering as a profession? We talked about that yesterday. Mechanical engineering sort of goes back thousands of years to the Egyptian pyramids and things like that. We talked about other sub-disciplines, professional engineering, the scientific method. Today I want to talk a little bit more about the scope of engineering, and how engineering goes from engineering science to engineering management.
§6. LIGO and where the best engineering at MIT is done [15:56]
Where is the best engineering at MIT done? And which department? Course 3? Nope. Course 5? Nope. The physics department. If you go look — usually, I mean, if you're a nuclear engineer you might say, Al Couture over here is the fusion reactor, that's part of the nuclear engineering department. It is. But it's also part of the physics department. If you go to the largest National Science Foundation project ever — about a billion-dollar project, a partnership between Caltech and MIT, started almost thirty years ago — I've actually asked the retired chief scientist if he would come in and give a lecture: the LIGO project. Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. They're trying to measure the most accurate measurement ever made — one part in 10 to the 23rd — and measure gravity waves from space. A billion-dollar project. They have two Michelson interferometers — these are the 90-degree ones — you send the lasers with a laser, and then you get the beating frequency coming back if the two of them shorten in length. The engineering that goes into it to align those four-kilometer legs — they have two of them in Livingston, Louisiana, and two of them up in Hanford, Washington. People propose putting others on the moon, and putting some in Australia, because the more, it's like astrophysical telescopes. This is a telescope of the sort — it's trying to measure length due to gravity waves coming from space, and they would verify Einstein's general theory of relativity and someone would win a Nobel Prize.
It's an interesting scientific experiment. Probably won't affect anything about your health or your standard of living. Actually it will affect your standard of living because the government spent a billion dollars on it — but what's a billion dollars when you owe fifteen trillion? The engineering is incredible. I've walked through parts of it. If I can get Ray to come in some time, you can look up LIGO on the internet if you're interested. It's an incredible feat of engineering to align those tubes. They had to develop surveying instruments that keep these tubes straight, not with the curvature of the earth, but straight on an astrophysical scale. The earth is curved, and they had to do it within one or two centimeters out of four kilometers. You start figuring out the precision of that. No civil engineer had ever tried anything within about a factor of fifty of that before. They had to develop, using GPS and other things, surveying techniques that had never been done by any engineers before.
§7. Physics, engineering, and the cleaning of house at MIT [19:46]
A lot of the stuff of World War Two — radar, the equipment — was first brought to the physics department. There's a little bit of history about that at MIT. The physics department was originally — or a lot of the School of Science was basically there to serve the needs of the engineering departments at MIT. School of Engineering is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. The physics department was there to teach physics to the engineers. The chemistry department was there to teach chemistry to the engineers. Basically most other departments have been created to help teach the engineers, because this was mens et manus. If you read William Barton Rogers, it said it was to be a place where they taught the arts but they were doing it from the fundamentals. The fundamentals was the science. But they were basically service people.
What happened in the early 1930s or about that time — they had some very practical physicists who were great mechanical people. Ever heard of Charles Stark Draper, Draper Labs? Charles Stark Draper came here as a professor of physics. My thesis advisor's thesis advisor, John Wulff, had worked with one of the quantum mechanics experiments. I can't remember right now, but if I go back through the academic genealogy — they have an academic tree. John Wulff is my grandfather in academic terms. My great-grandfather is — it's not Seebeck, anyway, I can't remember. But John Wulff was an experimental quantum mechanics physicist, and he came to the MIT physics department. There was a quantum mechanics guy named John Slater in the late 1920s, early 1930s, who became head of the physics department, and he decided we didn't want any of these people who did mechanical things or experiments. He was a theoretician, the guy who did calculations on hydrogen molecules — the quantum mechanics of hydrogen molecules when you didn't have fancy computers. I remember the story I heard Stark Draper tell at dinner one night — he came back from his sabbatical and found out he didn't have an office at MIT in the physics department anymore. He'd been told he was going over to Aero and Astro. He was basically a guy who built very fine precise instruments. World War Two comes along, he develops a bombsight, he develops some of the artillery stuff, and Draper Lab just grew and grew.
John Wulff got kicked out of physics and was sent to the metallurgy department. He became a very notable metallurgist. The Metals Processing building, Building 35 — you look up at the top it says metals processing, eaten away, I've been concrete on the outside — John Wulff built that building. So the physicists at one time at MIT were actually engineers. Historically. Not anymore, not since Slater came in. He cleaned house. None of these people did anything practical — couldn't have that. That's the difference. I told you about the culture at Caltech versus MIT: the practical engineering. Caltech is the you-don't-ever-mix-industry-with-academia school.
After World War Two, Gordon Brown, who was the Dean of Engineering at MIT, came from New Zealand. He basically saw the great things that had been done with scientific approaches in World War Two, and he decided to get rid of all the more practical engineering people and move MIT toward engineering science. Alfred Sloan came along, gave a bunch of money, and moved the management school — created the management school — out of a department in the School of Engineering. So that's how things have evolved. Management at one time was part of engineering. I told you the Harvard Business School was Harvard's answer when they couldn't purchase MIT for an engineering school. They built the Harvard Business School. Frederick Taylor was basically a professor of industrial engineering. He was one of Harvard Business School's guiding lights in the 1920s. You couldn't tell the difference between a businessman and an engineer in the 1920s and 1930s. But when Gordon Brown and others did this stuff in the 1950s, everybody else follows what MIT does. We do something and then the other schools follow on about ten years later.
They started going toward engineering science. So what's happened is the management side and some of the more practical side — I told you, two deans ago, if you were not a pure engineering scientist, if you were a practical person who actually built things or solved bigger problems, you wouldn't get tenure. It still persists in the twenty-first century. So we're going to talk about some of that. But in fact there's still the problem Francis Walker pointed out in 1911: engineers are sort of thought of as the lower classes of society. The national engineering honor society I mentioned yesterday, Tau Beta Pi, was formed at Lehigh University in the 1880s because Phi Beta Kappa would not let those dirty engineers into the arts and sciences. They were a lower type of academia. So Tau Beta Pi became the national engineering society.
§8. The founding of the National Academy of Engineering [25:50]
There was a National Academy of Sciences, but then in the mid-1960s they founded the National Academy of Engineering, because people realized — not necessarily people at MIT, but actually it was some people at MIT — that a lot of the problems solved during World War Two were really engineering solutions. This comes out of a book, Making of the NAE, that came out in 1989 or so, twenty-five years ago. They formed the National Academy of Engineering. There's a vote that came around last week: there's something called the Institute of Medicine. There's the National Academy of Sciences, which Abraham Lincoln chartered, then in '64 there was the National Academy of Engineering, and then about 1970 they formed the Institute of Medicine. Now they're voting to dissolve the Institute of Medicine and call it the National Academy of Medicine. So you have Science, Engineering, and Medicine. There's very few people who are members of all three. Actually I almost asked one of those three people, the youngest one to become a member of all three — a guy named Bob Langer. You might know of Bob Langer. He's one of the great scientists and engineers at MIT in drug delivery and all kinds of biomedical stuff.
Let me read this paragraph from the beginning of this book on the making of NAE. "For almost two decades since the end of the war, the public perceived" — this is like early 1960s — "World War Two had been mostly a scientists' war. Although engineering achievements were vital in making the A-bomb possible, the credit went to Oppenheimer and his team of physicists." When you read about the A-bomb you don't really hear about the engineers. Does anyone know who was in charge? Oppenheimer was the scientific lead, but the person who had overall charge was an army general, an MIT grad. Groves. General Groves was an MIT civil engineer. His previous assignment, before being put in charge of the Manhattan Project, was to build the Pentagon. He did that in the late 1930s. Then he was put in charge of part of the Manhattan Project. Part of the Manhattan Project was basically to build all these cities in the middle of nowhere — Oak Ridge, Los Alamos. He had to build cities in weeks for all these people.
The scientists got the credit, but there are other things, like the production of Liberty ships. From keel to floating the ship off — in some cases they got down to two weeks to build a ship. That's a pretty significant engineering achievement. Aircraft too. People were recognizing it wasn't just scientists, it was engineers. In 1960, right after he stepped out as president, Eisenhower was presented the Hoover Medal. The Hoover Medal is given by an assemblage of four engineering societies: American Society of Civil Engineers; AIME, which is mining, metallurgical, petroleum, and twentieth-century materials engineers; American Society of Mechanical Engineers; and the Institute of Electrical Engineers. The four big engineering societies basically give out the Hoover Medal. They decided to give it to Eisenhower. In the past it had gone to people like Vannevar Bush — Vannevar Bush had been Dean of Engineering at MIT, and he was down in Washington during World War Two helping direct the science programs. Charles Kettering — anyone know who Charles Kettering was? He basically invented leaded gasoline. He went to General Motors. If you look him up on Google, he invented all kinds of things that had nothing to do with anything. He could just invent in any field. He was just very creative. A great engineer.
Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall — this is not George Marshall of the Marshall Plan — in his eloquent address at the giving of the Hoover Medal, said: to dig the Panama Canal and free it of rock slides over many years required the movement of seventy-two million tons of earth. Not pounds — seventy-two million tons. That's a lot of rock. The Suez Canal, like that. The United Kingdom moved even more, transported across oceans in the face of enemy peril, to artificial harbors — this is for D-Day. Omaha Beach. They built a whole docking system and moved it across the English Channel for D-Day. When the engineers left that night they felt pride in the achievements of their profession. Marshall did go to MIT but then he transferred over to West Point — a military engineer.
"For perhaps a hundred years, roughly between 1850 and World War Two, engineers enjoyed a solid public reputation that was tantamount to worship." A hundred fifty years ago, we were worshipped. I've never seen anyone worship me lately. The opening of harbors, building a thousand bridges, essentially building North America, the joining of the railways the way across America. So engineers were highly regarded, but the scientists were taking center stage on the Manhattan Project and a lot of these other things. They formed the National Academy of Engineering in 1964. The original members included twenty-four or twenty-five founding members. I highlighted in yellow those that have an MIT affiliation. Tony Gonzaga was actually here when I came as a freshman. His office was on the second floor of Building 8. He was in this department. He was our last professor of mining.
Here we have Vannevar Bush, who has an MIT affiliation. Herb Hollomon used to head up General Electric research, but he's an MIT grad — I think he's a Course 3 grad actually. Tony Gonzaga, a professor. Bob Seamans, who basically was in charge of building the space shuttle, then he became president of NAE — and when I was hired as an assistant professor, he was Dean of Engineering at MIT. Walter Rosenblith was Provost back in the 1980s. He's one of the only dozen people who's a member of all three of the National Academies: Medicine, Engineering, and Sciences. Frank Press, a professor of geology here when I was a young professor, was elected president of the National Academy of Sciences. Ralph Landau — anybody know where his name is on campus? It's the chemical engineering building, 66. His picture is in there. Very successful MIT grad and wealthy. Stephen Bechtel, you might know who he is — Bechtel Corporation, probably the world's largest construction firm, built huge projects all around the world, some of the first nuclear reactors. An MIT grad. And there's good old Charles Draper.
About a third of the photos of people in here are MIT people. A third of the people who founded the National Academy were MIT people. Eight out of twenty-five or so. When you graduate and go out there in the real world, you're going to find MIT still exerts a tremendous leadership. We're not half, we're only about a third of the major leaders. We're not all of them, but anyway.
§9. The Great Engineering Achievements of the Twentieth Century [35:15]
The National Academy of Engineering at the turn of the twenty-first century came up with the great engineering achievements of the twentieth century. We need to look at these. I'm going to put them up so you can see them. Electrification — Edison and Westinghouse — making electricity available even in rural areas, which was a real challenge because economically you can't justify running the wires out to the farms. That's one of the externalities of engineering. Everyone in the city could benefit because in the cities you have enough customers that you could sell the electricity and make a profit, and you didn't have to run the wires that far. But to start giving it to the farmers — that's a lot of copper to get out to that farm. They had to work various ways, whether tax incentives for the companies or whatever, to get electrification out.
It's still a problem in certain parts of the country. You might know what state probably has the biggest problem with not having enough rural electrification. Alaska. Too big to run those wires. They basically run diesel generators in their little towns. It might only be fifty people in a town and they run diesel generators, paying about a dollar a kilowatt-hour. Pretty pricey. I'm paying twenty cents a kilowatt-hour this year. Last year I think it was fifteen. They told me Saudi Arabia is giving me a break this year.
The automobile — obviously, people now can go places. The airplane. Safe and abundant water. If you went back to the nineteenth century, a lot of people were drinking some pretty bad water. Electronics — look at all the things we can do now. Radio and television. Agricultural mechanization — this actually started earlier than the twentieth century, in the early nineteenth century, with the Cyrus McCormick wheat reaper. Then John Deere, Caterpillar, people like that.
In the eighteenth century into the early nineteenth, ninety-seven percent of the populace was involved in agriculture. Ninety-seven people out of a hundred was what it took to do the labor to grow the food for a hundred people. People like George Washington was a farmer, but he had slaves and other people working for him. Thomas Jefferson was a farmer. These people didn't do real work themselves. They were like the financial people on Wall Street, the Goldman Sachs of the world.
Computers. Telephone. Air conditioning and refrigeration. I've actually read articles where Houston was never settled until the invention of air conditioning. If you've ever been in Houston in the summer, it's pretty hot and humid — pretty miserable.
If you want to learn about the telephone, there's a book called The Idea Factory. There's actually one about MIT, written by a guy from kind of graduate student mechanical engineering, and it's a bad book about MIT. But there's the same title, The Idea Factory, by a guy who wrote about Bell Labs — how AT&T got a monopoly and was able to pour all this money into Bell Labs and all the things that came out of it. As you read The Idea Factory, he gives credit to Bell Labs for many inventions, some of which MIT should take part of the credit for, if not all the credit. Even among the engineers there's a little war for different things.
Interstate highways — we've talked about that. It was a military program hidden as an infrastructure program — actually it was both. Space exploration. The internet, obviously. Imaging technologies, which you can go back to x-rays — Roentgen — he x-rayed his wife's hand because that was the way to hit on her wedding ring. But there's all kinds of other imaging that we do — there's a whole imaging center over here across Vassar Street, the Picower Center, for medical imaging.
Household appliances. Why was that important? Ninety-seven percent of the people were in agriculture in 1795. A lot of people in the nineteenth century were still using washboards to clean their clothes. Most people back then only put on a clean set of clothes once a week if that often. Household appliances allowed a lot of people to get off the farm. Today we grow not only all our food, but we could feed the world — not the whole world, but a substantial fraction of the world, probably twenty-five percent, with less than three percent of the U.S. population.
Some societies, like Japan — anybody know how many people are involved in agriculture in Japan? Fifty percent at least it was a few years ago. The Japanese have a culture where working as a farmer is a very important thing culturally, and so they protect the rice crop. When I took my sabbatical over there in the mid-80s, I thought one thing would be neat as a gift would be to give him a pound of wild rice. I was not allowed to bring wild rice even to give it away into Japan. The Japanese protect their rice farmers. The price of rice in Japan in 1985 was seven times the world's price. This was before Thailand came in to beat everybody in growing rice. Thailand is the place that grows most of the rice now. In any case, household appliances allowed a lot of people to get off the farm and come to the cities, doing electronics and other things.
Health technologies — you know how medicine has changed, and all the technology there. Petroleum and gas technologies. I think they missed the boat a little bit here in that they should have included petroleum and gas with mining. I've had debates with people: there are only three areas where we create wealth — three businesses or activities. Mining, which I include petroleum as part of mining. They include petroleum at NAE not exactly that way, but let's go on. Mining. Agriculture, where we grow things. And manufacturing — you take raw materials, which you might dig out of the ground or grow — it could be wood or it could be iron ore — and convert it to some useful product. There's a value-added function of manufacturing.
One person at Intel has tried to convince me that I should add information to the list. Of course, personnel from Intel want to have bits as important pieces of something. There's some merit to that. But everything else is just redistribution of wealth. It's not creating a bigger pie, it's just redistributing it. That's why people get so upset with the financial analysts on Wall Street. What's their productive effort? That's what Donald Trump says — they just push paper around and they make billions of dollars for doing it. Hey Donald, do you know how you made your money? He started — that's his nest egg — but he made a lot more than his dad did. He also made it by being maybe not as difficult as it should be. Did anyone watch the debates last night? Carly Fiorina really hit him, and he replied, I respect women. That's believable.
Laser and fiber optics — replaced all the copper. We wouldn't have an internet if we didn't have fiber optics. Nuclear technologies for energy. And high-performance materials, which barely made it in there. Jim Williams had been head of aircraft engines at General Electric, and he kind of said, hey, we've got to have materials in there somewhere. He's a materials person, and so they put in high-performance materials.
§10. Twenty-first century challenges and large-scale problems [45:25]
In addition the National Academy came up with engineering challenges for the twenty-first century. They were doing this in the early twenty-first century. As one of the quantum mechanicians said, it's very difficult to predict, especially the future. Making solar energy economical. I think we've done it. I've done a remodeling of my house, and if I put the new roof on, I'm going to put solar cells up there. I'm going to get solar energy at fifteen cents a kilowatt-hour, and I'm paying twenty cents to the town. So solar energy is basically economical now.
Energy from fusion — we've been working on it for a long time, but maybe someday in the next hundred years we'll do it. You've got to get rid of the CO2 we're generating. Manage the nitrogen cycle. What's that mean? Fertilizer, exactly. That's an interesting — it's not part of the nitrogen cycle, but to tell you what Professor Allanore is working on. Potash — fertilizer comes as 6-12-4 or something, it has these dash numbers, and one of them's potash, one's nitrogen, and one is sulfur I think. That's necessary for plants to grow. Nitrogen is what makes the plants green. There's a guy over in chemistry who found an inexpensive, low-energy way to break the double bond of nitrogen, which is one of the most stable bonds in the periodic table, and that's important for being able to make fertilizer.
To make the potash, which is the potassium — all the potassium mines are in the northern hemisphere. Saskatchewan, and the Soviet Union I think, are the two big sources of potash. They've got huge resources, but transporting all that potash to the southern hemisphere is a problem. People in Brazil came to Professor Allanore a couple years ago and said, we have tremendous granite deposits that actually have a fair amount of potassium in them, but we don't know how to extract the potassium and make it water soluble so we could use it for fertilizer. He's working on that. This year they have planted fields in Brazil and they're going to compare how the granite fertilizer works. That's solving a large-scale problem — not the nitrogen cycle, but a potash problem for people in the southern hemisphere.
Access to clean water. There's a couple of papers by Alexander Slocum, who's in mechanical engineering. He's going to come and lecture on October first. I told him we're teaching a class on What Is Engineering. He's co-listed — for me to list this as Course 2, Course 3, I have to have someone from mechanical engineering listed. So he's co-listed. He is one of the three brightest people I've ever known. Bob Langer's another. The other one was my roommate as a freshman. Alex Slocum wrote a book on precision engineering. It's a fairly thick book. It is the book on precision engineering. He was twenty-two when he wrote it. He's an interesting person. We can talk about his personality versus my personality and how we're both outcasts at MIT in different ways.
His idea here, with some other people — he's a great collaborator, people in Hawaii and other places — is he's pointing out the ideal height for hydroelectric energy is about 500 to 700 meters. That's about a thousand to twelve hundred psi pressure. It's also the same for reverse osmosis desalination. This is a July thirty-first 2015 draft paper that he's chosen to talk about. There are two papers — you should read them before October first. They will be posted today by Jerry. But that's a large-scale project.
I ought to stop here. We'll finish up some of these other things. Simone will be here tomorrow, and I'm not sure who's doing Monday, but it might be me, it could be Simone. He'll not have to talk tomorrow. [Tom indicates a bundle of paper clips on the desk.] This thing is a bunch of paper clips, and I'll talk about that the next lecture, so don't worry about that right now. We talked about some large-scale projects of engineering — I want to talk about small-scale projects like the pencil and the paper clip. So you can engineer from the small.