MSE_F2017_07

Only me, but I've never trusted the Registrar in the 41 years I've been a faculty member. Can't get accurate information from them for about 12 months after his registration day. Anyway, I'm Tom Eagar, a faculty member in Course 3, and of course Dr. Simone Belmar [Belmonte?] is a lecturer in Course 3, and he and I will be teaching the primary part of this. But we also have Dr. Brian Holman, who is back there on the videography. Dr. Belmar is back there in the corner wearing a white shirt — you can tell he's not a student anymore, I guess. The two of you are in a white shirt and I'm not. I didn't wear a white shirt.

In any case, this is a course on structural materials. It's actually more of a course on stories I have known, or stories we have known. Dr. Belmar tells stories as well as I do, and Brian also has a few stories, not as many — he has to get older to have more stories. But there's the basic information. This should be posted on Stellar. Is it yet? Right, okay, so this is on Stellar. You'll notice that we're videotaping the class. Do you have volunteers for — are not volunteers, but — alright, we pay about fifty bucks an hour to come to class and stand there like Brian's doing with a videotape, because we videotape the class.

It is possible to take this class without ever walking into the classroom. There is at least one student taking it from Washington DC this semester. So those of you who have scheduling conflicts, it shouldn't be a problem so far as that goes. It shouldn't be too much of a problem after the first day of class because half of you won't come anymore. You'll watch it on — do the course online so far as that goes. And in fact, one of the reasons we have become one of the larger courses in the department is because we're flexible on scheduling, okay, so far as that goes.

Since I don't have a good count from the Registrar — I mean, I had 26 pre-registered and now I have 15 registered, but they don't list the undergraduate course. My secretary tells me the Registrar doesn't list the undergraduate course. How many people here are undergraduates? See, somehow you must have heard about it, right? Did you see 3.371 listed? Okay, well she can't find it in her part of the book. She's dealing with the Registrar, but that's okay. Which is why I would like to pass this around, which is my own sign-up sheet. I've done this every year for 41 years because I don't trust the Registrar. If you just tell us your name — even if you decide to drop later, at least I just want to try to get an accounting of names — because I can say the Registrar's list doesn't usually start being accurate for several weeks. So I'll go with what I've got.

The course is taught in modules, and we'll get into that. Dr. Belmar will do a module, I'll do a module with some help from Brian. We front-load the course to the first half of the semester, and hopefully we also front-load your assignments to the first two-thirds or whatever. There is a sign-in sheet that I just passed around, or you can contact my assistant Jerry Hill in 4-138, which is just down the hall.

We meet every day of the week, at least for the first half of the term approximately. And what I did, I put up the month of September of what the intended schedule is as of today, with the initials of who's supposed to be lecturing. And it just to a certain extent depends on which of the three of us is in town at any particular one. There's some chairs up here if you'd like. There's two over there and there's three more over here and Brian, and there's another one back there.

So anyway, we meet — forget the fact that the Registrar calls Tuesdays and Thursdays recitations. I don't know what a recitation is, and of course like this. But it's the only way I could get all five days scheduled. There's a schedules office — they don't know how to deal with the way I schedule. The time is 9 to 10. If you want to come to class — if you want to watch the video, we try to get the videos posted within 48 hours. Often they're posted same day. And it's YouTube's free streaming. Do we have — is it restricted YouTube? It's not restricted, so anybody in the world can watch this class, but only you get credit because you paid tuition, okay.

We should finish the live lectures in the first half of the semester, and you will have to do a student paper which will be due actually I think at the end of October. I've got it on the schedule later. The theme of the course is flexibility in a stress-free environment. I'm going to talk in a little bit about how I do not appreciate the way we teach at either MIT or in the United States in general. We teach students to take quizzes and pass tests, and you'll see later, you wouldn't have gotten here if you didn't know how to take a test, okay. So you don't need to learn how to take tests here.

There are a number of available modules based on prior years. These are — if you go to my website up here, you'll see the listing under my classes, and these are the ones that I've done over the last seven or eight years. There's one on material selection, which is what I'm going to be doing live this semester, and then there's some others. Most of these are twelve-lecture modules, and you have to do three modules to equal 36 lectures, which is a full 12-unit course at MIT, right. And in fact, you can take this course the second time — should say that in the catalog somewhere — because if you take three different modules you're taking a different course, right. But there's a lot of flexibility here because you can decide what modules you want to take.

Dr. Belmar has taught materials processing, and actually there's a description specifically on the two live lectures. This should be on Stellar — this is the syllabus that's on Stellar. And actually, Simone, you want to tell them a little bit about what you're going to do? An overview of materials, structural materials and service.

[Belmar speaks, inaudible/off-mic.] All in the spring. So getting overview of materials, okay. And mine is on material selection and economics. And that was sort of chosen this semester for me because MIT is trying to make this into a short MITx video. And so tomorrow there will be the MIT video production professionals, and Brian can take the day off, okay, videotaping. But we figured we'd do it to a live audience, assuming you'll be live tomorrow here, some of you. And so for a couple of the first days, I'm gonna give the same lectures but on material selection and economics.

So as I say, Dr. Belmar said there are a couple of others. If you want to focus just on kind of mechanical behavior and processing, that's kind of his specialty. And I have more on processing. We also have a couple of others that have been done in the past. Dr. Nielsen actually was an undergraduate and then a graduate student, got his PhD here, then he went on to get an MD. And he did, a couple years ago when I was on sabbatical, he did a module on how a physician does non-destructive testing or non-destructive evaluation of the human body when you go in for a checkup. Turns out — what I learned from sitting in on it — they use all five senses: touch, smell, taste, you know, and sight and hearing, to kind of get signals from you about what's going wrong, if there is something going wrong.

And Steve Lyons is an attorney. He's a graduate of the Sloan School but he's an attorney in downtown Boston at the firm Climbing [Cleminger?] and Lyons. And he does intellectual property, and he feels that students need to learn something about intellectual property like copyrights and patents. And if you're gonna start a business of your own, he thinks you need to know some of these things. And he's done this twice, and in fact sometime over the next few months I should go over to the SDM, LFM — our leader for global operations — and see if we can't get him his own course that he would teach rather than being a module in my course. But the students have enjoyed it. If you want to be an entrepreneur, that's a good module to consider, okay. Any questions? No questions. Okay.

The requirements are: watch three modules, 36 lectures. There are a couple of half lectures so you'd have to do two halves. Prepare a one-page outline of each of the 12 lectures in the module, so that's three pages of outline, and one or two lines describing two or three themes of that lecture. And there's actually a story that goes along with this.

It turns out I learned, as a junior, I decided I should take Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, 8.11 was the course number. When I was an undergraduate it wasn't required, but I was in materials, and if you're gonna do electronic materials, solid-state physics, you should know some quantum mechanics. So I decided to take an elective in the physics department. And for most of that semester it was an absolute disaster for me. I didn't have a clue what was going on. Had a wonderful lecturer, Vera Castilla-Kowski [Kistiakowsky], was the first PhD woman tenured faculty member in the physics department. Her father won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry at Harvard. I remember she'd bring her big German Shepherd to class with her and things. But that was about all I learned in the class. The first part of the class I was getting 15s out of a hundred when the class average was 85 on the homeworks. And I wouldn't do it too well — I just didn't follow this stuff.

And so the night before the exam, I figured, well, I'll just pick up the book and I'll try to study the high points. And I went through the book, spent about an hour and a half, two hours, just studying the high points of the chapters and stuff we had covered. Went into the exam — that three-hour exam — the next day, finished it in an hour and 20 minutes, checked it over, left after two hours. And I thought I'd done pretty well. I got an A in the course. And that shocked me. And all of a sudden I said, oh, you mean all the rest of this stuff they teach is just fluff, okay. There's only two or three key points that you need to know. And in fact, once you start lecturing you actually find out that there's only two or three key points you can get across in 50 minutes.

So what you're supposed to do in your one-page outline is to start to figure out — I used to call it "guess my lecture," okay. What is it the lecturer is trying to get across? Can you summarize in two or three sound bites what the key issues are? And that's how I finished my MIT career. I no longer took notes in class. I would just sit there and I would try to figure out, what is he really trying to say? What is the outline of this? What is the point of all this discussion? And all the rest is just a bunch of fluff, okay. If you can get down to the basic principles, then you don't have to study for the quizzes or anything else. It actually did work for me. I've tried to explain it to students, and I don't know — fair many of them have ever figured it out for themselves. But it was the way I got through this place.

So when you watch the modules, even if you're watching the modules live, you need to write down one or two lines. And Brian has posted some of these from previous years — actually some more of the primary ones — but they will be on in a few days, okay. So you'll see what the students in the past have written. And we picked some of the better ones, okay, the students who have done a better job. But it'll give you an idea of what we mean. It shouldn't take you much. It's basically just causing you, hopefully, to reflect on that lecture that day. And even if you're watching it on a video at home or wherever, it causes you to stop and think: what did they really try to say? How can I do the elevator talk for this one-hour lecture?

You have to prepare a 10-page paper on a materials topic of your choice. I'll give you some examples. It really can be a materials topic of your choice. I find if you write about something you're interested in, you'll do a much better job than if I give you a topic. If you can't think of a topic, then you can come see me and we can talk about topics. I'll try to give you some ideas. It must be something you're interested in, okay. And you should review or watch 20 other — not watch, I used to have presentations, but with this many students we don't do presentations — you should review 20 other student papers. So that's actually a fair amount of time. But I will tell you that many of the students find they learn a lot. Some have told me they learn more from the students' papers than they do from class. Wait a second, that's not very complimentary. Anyway.

The papers are to be published in the MIT Series in Materials and Technology. We have a website. Sometimes the papers are really exceptional. I remember one — an LGO [LFM/LGO] student from 25 years ago, was from Alcoa, and he decided he wanted to talk about how do you make an aluminum can. And he had references because — what did he have as a resource? Alcoa research labs, right. And they were all public information, but no one could have ever come up with all these references unless you'd worked for Alcoa, okay. But it was a great paper. In fact, I told him I thought he ought to publish it. And so we are going to let you publish things. And we'd like you to, in a sense, practice your skills in preparing a paper as if it is going to be a professional publication, and publish it in the MIT series, which is just a website. And Brian has picked out some of those from prior years, and you'll be able to access all the ones we did last year.

You will have to sign a copyright release form assigning rights to MIT, but you maintain co-ownership. And we'll get you that. It may already be on Stellar — I think Jerry already put it on Stellar. There's a form you have to sign so that no one's going to come sue me for publishing your stuff without your permission. But that's standard nowadays. If you've published in the open literature, most journals — in fact all journals — require you to assign the rights to the journal. It's got to be editable by future students, which means use Microsoft Word, okay. So other students can go in, because it's possible — if someone already chose your topic, well, you ought to go and just start with what they wrote and edit it and add to it. And it can go from being a 10-page paper to a 15 or 20-page paper, and it will get to be more in-depth, and both of you will have your names assigned to it. Okay, 10 pages maximum. I don't want you to spend a hundred hours on this paper, okay. 10 pages, double-spaced. I get a couple of students saying, "Is this supposed to be single-spaced or double-spaced?" Well, I can't read single-spaced anymore, okay. Your sources should be referenced just like a professional paper. And you can do up to one page author biography so we know who you are for eternity, right. And these are types of things you have to do.

I really try to be done by Halloween with everything. I mean, I've learned, once we go off daylight savings time and you have a nine o'clock class and the students have to get up in the dark, okay, they don't — okay, if it's dark outside, you stay asleep, okay. Anyway. Any questions? If not — potential topics. It could be something on the elements. That was an idea I had but no one used it last year. You could pick an element and you could talk about it. You could talk about a commodity like steel or aluminum or concrete. I'm going to talk about some of those in some of my lectures as well. Simone, you could talk about a technology — open-die forging or sand casting or whatever you want, if you're interested.

Topics that were done last year: Japanese sword smithing. There's actually a student who did — there's a little display in the hallway right here just down the hall, twenty yards down the hall, on Japanese swordsmithing. And some students actually made some steel the way the Japanese would have years ago, and they forged it into swords — and a sword, okay. One of them did materials issues in the sinking of the Titanic — lousy steel with a chip, okay, hit the iceberg and just split open. Materials in a nuclear power plant — so the student was a nuclear engineer, and they were interested. Topic of your choice, something you're interested in. Materials for pole vaulting — I've had I think maybe three students over the years who were pole vaulters, and they like to talk about the poles for pole vaulting. Have you ever watched pole vaulting, and you see the thing bend back 180 degrees or more? Well, it doesn't do that without snapping without a little engineering going into it. It's actually a fairly interesting composite. Or make a proposal, okay.

In fact, that's one of the things you'll have to do. You're going to have to write a proposal by September 25th, about a half a page, on what it is you choose. We want to encourage you to start early thinking about your topic, okay. So I can — any topic you want, ten pages double-spaced, don't be too general, okay. I don't want "Henry Ford, how to build an automobile," okay. Or the classic old MIT exam question: "define the universe and give three examples," okay. We want something that you can do a good job in and conveying some information. And the pole vaulting poles are a good example of something pretty specific, but you can do a good job of understanding it. And people have done tennis rackets, a number of people like to do sports equipment. Don't be too broad about something, okay. I'm going to talk about the space program, okay, but NASA spends 20 billion dollars a year on it, and I doubt you can do a good job in 10 pages covering everything, okay.

I do want your own analysis. I mean, we want to know what you think. This is something that's of interest to you, and you ought to have an opinion. If you don't have an opinion, form one, okay, by doing the study, so far as that goes. As an example of the elements, you could talk about how the element was discovered, the economics of the element, the externalities — which we'll talk about in my lecture tomorrow, about what externalities are. These are other factors that come into play for different materials. The availability and extraction, uses, recycling. And if you wanted, this is — you could go to the US Geological Survey, that website already has the whole outline done for you, for every element. Not every element, but about 70% of the elements. You want to look up technetium, they'll have an article on technetium, won't be very long. Anybody will know why technetium is not very long? Yeah, it's unstable. It has about a 10-hour half-life. It doesn't exist on earth except in nuclear reactors.

And actually we do make technetium. Last week I had two different tests using technetium. They injected it into my body and then they took pictures and I was glowing, okay, so they could see my heart pumping, okay, and things like that. But I only glowed for 10 hours, and then half as much, and then 10 hours later half as much, you know. But the first time they ever saw technetium was the light from supernova, which is where technetium is — that's where all the heavy elements are made, when stars blow up. Anyway, if you can't think of anything, there's a potential source — if you go to that website.

And even if you're interested in something like dysprosium — why should you be interested in dysprosium? No one knows why you're interested in dysprosium? Yeah, well, mostly Mischmetals are good for sparks because if you do mechanical friction you get a very rapid spark, because there's lots of — likes to burn in air. But dysprosium in particular — anybody heard of neodymium-iron-boron magnets, okay? The problem with neodymium-iron-boron magnets, they're very strong, but their Curie temperature is like 140 degrees Fahrenheit. And so for example, I bought two all-electric vehicles in June, okay. Now I'm gas-free, okay, not completely — my wife still has — well, actually she has one of the two and I have the other, but we have a third car that's gas in case we want to go on a long trip, because these things only have a 200 to 240 mile range. But they have dysprosium magnets in the motor, because dysprosium-iron-boron will go to 180 or 190 degrees Fahrenheit. And some of these motors in the car, if you push it real hard in the mountains or something, can get above 140, and all of a sudden your motor won't work, okay. So dysprosium-iron-boron is sort of replacing the neodymium [neodymium-iron-boron] where you need higher temperature, for example. But if someone was interested in dysprosium as an element, okay, you could write a whole 10-page paper on it. You could actually write a whole book on most of these things, okay.

Grading in the course: no tests, no quizzes, no finals. I don't believe in them. I hated them as a student, and so why should I make you go through it, okay. Submission of a proposed topic, a half page, tell us what you want to write about — me, Dr. Belmar, Brian, he may read some of them as well. Tell us what you want to write about. I want to make sure you don't think you're gonna cover something that's way too broad, or whatever. And we'd also like you to think about it between now and then. I want you to learn to front-load the course. You will really — and I think we've talked to students from prior years — you will really appreciate in November being done with this course, okay, when all your other courses are gearing up, right, for the end of the term.

By the way, are any of you taking this course for the second time? Okay, you are. Okay, yeah. Okay, I'm taking it for the seventh time, so it's okay. But I actually have had students — a couple students take it three times, which I thought, hmm. Anyway, you could take it three times. I'm supposed to tell you about collusion with other people in the class. Since there's no quizzes, we're not in competition here. You can say whatever you like to each other and talk about whatever you want.

You'll be evaluated — and actually I'd list these requirements a through e. So there's a half-page paper by September 25th. Your paper will be due at the end of October, right before Halloween, so you can enjoy Halloween. Edits, three other papers, somewhere around November 1st. We will assign you three papers, and Brian will send you the three other papers of other people. And we try to group them in things that might be of common interest if we can. But all you have to do is go through it and make comments for the other person. You don't have to rewrite the paper, and we'll give you some guidelines on what you have to do. I'm not asking you to rewrite it for them. But just like if you submitted it to a journal for publication, you'll get reviewers' comments back, and they'll say, well, I didn't understand this part, it's not clear, or I think figure 17 is unnecessary, okay, or whatever. And they're going to make comments. And then you should get those back by just after Thanksgiving — 12/1, you know, it's actually the Friday after — the Monday after Thanksgiving, okay. Yeah, so I'm not making you do it over Thanksgiving. But I find a number of students get this done well before Thanksgiving, and then you're basically done other than taking those comments and putting your paper in final form. It's just like writing a paper for a journal, okay, this is the same type of process you would go through. And that's actually due the last day of class, but if you get it done early — and frankly I think most people got it done two or three weeks early and were completed with this course, okay.

You also have to watch or read some of these other papers. You'll have three to read completely, and I don't know if it's gonna be twenty — if you were watching modules at five minutes apiece it would be 20, but you should — we'll ask you to watch — how many did we do last year, was it five or ten? I don't remember, I'll have to look. But we want you to pick some papers that you like and you can enjoy reading, okay. Let's see what the other students wrote. It's kind of nice to know what the other students are interested in. And so those are the five requirements. And this will all be on Stellar, like I said. Many of the students say they learned a lot from the other students' papers, okay. And you can watch these whenever you want. My one of my favorite comments was the student who said he used to watch my lectures while he fixed dinner, okay. Any questions? Any comments, Simone? Oh, you've heard it before.

[Belmar comment, off-mic.] A lot of time happens every — so that's where we applied the emails, told my boss, you know, right.

So I've been teaching some version of this course for over 30 years. And in the beginning, part of my philosophy — I didn't care much for grades when I was a student, and so I used to just kind of give everybody an A. But the course was a little different. Now it's got so many students again — not everyone gets an A, okay. I'll tell you the two ways — but most people get an A, okay. The two ways to get a B: one is to write a paper that just totally ignores what we've been teaching you about materials, okay. You'll find that I don't think that all these materials that everybody thinks are so wonderful are so wonderful, okay. Like, lots of nanotechnology is a bunch of buzzwords, okay.

Last time I went down to an NSF review for selecting proposals of other people — you have to read 30 proposals in a day and a half — and at the end they wrapped up and they said, "Well, what did you learn from all these proposals?" And I said, "I learned to spell the word 'nano,'" okay. There's a young faculty member who was told by his NSF contract monitor that the contract monitor couldn't fund him because he didn't have "nano" in his proposal, okay. Now come on, folks, okay. The pendulum swings, but let's admit it's gone a little too far. It's not — there's not — something there about nanotechnology, but if you just give me the Wall Street Journal version of materials technology, you could earn a B in this course, okay. I want a little more thought, okay. And you'll come to know what that means when you hear some of my lectures.

The other thing — we did last year, if you missed the date, if you missed this — turn in your paper by the 30th. If you didn't get in your paper by the 30th, which I had to give out to the other students like one or two days later, you are now encroaching on another student's time. And I docked you a letter grade for the first week late. How about that? And a couple of people got docked, okay. No one got docked two letter grades. They all got it in that next week, okay.

So anyway, my teaching philosophy: too much of our educational approach is geared to taking tests, teaching students to take tests. I actually learned this about 25 years ago. I get up early in the morning, I was always dressed in the dark, and I'm usually out the door before anyone else in the house is awake. And I was sitting there eating some cereal at the breakfast table, and one of my children had left their math book — their high school math book — on the table. I said, oh, well, let's see what they're teaching in math in high school. And this math book — it was in modules just like I teach in modules. They had two pages on derivatives, they had two pages on integrals, they had two pages on exponents, they had two pages on matrices. I had no idea that math came in two-page increments, okay. And I thought, all they're doing is trying to prep the students for the SAT exam, okay. It's stupid, okay. It's not teaching them anything. It's just, you know, trying to get them to — anyway. So I've been thinking about this for a while, okay. You know how to take tests already. You don't have to prove that to me. This subject is not required for anyone, so let's just enjoy what we do.

And the thing is, as Einstein said — actually he wasn't the first one — he said, "As simple as possible, but no simpler." My thesis advisor, who studied to be a rabbi before he came here, said that was actually an older rabbinical saying, okay. So I guess maybe Einstein studied from the rabbis too. But keep it simple rather than complex. A lot of faculty try to impress you with their knowledge — they're the great guru of something, okay. And they want to impress you with how much more they know than you do, okay. I remember my wife was a student at Boston University and a class of 500 students, and this guy got up and said, "None of you will get an A in this class," on the first day of class. And of course people were shocked. And he says, "Because you don't know anything worth an A," okay. And she told me the story. I said, well, the only way he could possibly say that is because he knows he can't teach worth an A, okay.

How could he — I assumed, having been a student here, I know that most of you are smarter than I am, so I'm not going to compete with you, okay. I'm gonna try to show you that a lot of things you already know the answer to — no one ever tells you how to put the information together, no one ever tells you how to figure out what's really important, okay. For example, you've heard about going to Mars, right? You've heard about colonizing the moon, right? How practical is that, either one? Going to Mars takes two and a half years to get there, okay. And people who come back after a year in space, their bones are now starting to degenerate because they don't have any force applied to them from gravity. Well, they say, "Well, we're just spinning you around for two and a half years," dizzy. But there's a little bit of a problem. Plus, you know, it's probably not worse than the Chilean miners who were stuck, you know, a thousand feet underneath the ground, and they had to try to get them out. But there's not a lot of way to rescue people when they're halfway between here and Mars.

But the other thing, like colonizing the moon and stuff — does anyone know what it costs to put a pound of payload in orbit? Yeah, right. Exactly. And in fact, the Space Shuttle, when it was conceived of in the late 60s, was going to try to lower the price — now this was an earlier day when a dollar was worth more — they were trying to lower the price from $5,000 a pound to $1,000 a pound, okay. And did they succeed? The reason they canceled the Space Shuttle is because if you look at the pounds that went into orbit as payload, the Space Shuttle was costing about $40,000 a pound. They didn't lower the price, they increased the price, okay. So somebody said, "This is getting a little pricey," okay. So if you want to talk about colonizing the moon, okay, just getting a person up there — I mean, see how much they weigh and multiply by ten thousand, okay. And then see if that makes sense.

But you got Elon Musk, who everybody thinks is wonderful, okay. He's one of the richest men in the world now, right. And he says he wants to die on Mars — but not on landing. And I'm in favor of sending him, okay. If that's where he wants to die, I don't care if it's on landing or not. I mean, anyway. You probably should be on the trip. But anyway, so that's an example of where people haven't — they don't tell you the whole truth, okay, of things. And it's just as bad in materials, okay. And we'll get into some of those things, these little lies. And those are the types of little lies — if you give me back one of those lies on your paper, you could earn a B, okay. You've got to think about what's going on here, okay.

And you'll find that induction, deduction, extrapolation, and estimation are methods that will serve you well throughout your life. And hopefully in this course it'll be stress-free enough you can stop and think about things, okay. So my greatest inspiration comes when I'm shaving or when I'm taking a shower. I don't have anything else to do, and I think about something. I remember one time — this is a faculty member who's no longer here, but he was in — this was probably 30 years ago now — but electrically conductive polymers were a big thing at the time. He was a young faculty member in polymer science, and I was in the Chipman Room, and he was giving a presentation on his research. And he pointed out that these new electrically conductive polymers — which, in this case it was polyacetylene, and the problem with polyacetylene is it tends to be unstable in air, and so it decomposes, so it has sort of like technetium has about a 10-hour life, okay. He said, all the rotating machinery will no longer be using copper, because these electrically conductive polymers have a higher specific conductivity than copper.

So the next morning I'm shaving, and I almost cut myself when I realized, wait a second — aluminum has a lower specific electrical conductivity than copper. Right? No, aluminum is less dense than copper. It's got 60% of the electrical conductivity and it's got one third of the density, so its specific conductivity is twice that of copper. But they don't wind generators out of aluminum, they wind them out of copper. It's not the specific conductivity, it's the absolute conductivity that's important, okay. So people will fool you using the word "specific" and dividing by the density, and you end up with a half-truth, okay. But it sells things, okay.

3D printing, right. There's a firm started by some faculty in this department that has raised 215 million dollars — you might know about this — 215 million dollars to do sintering of metal, okay. In my opinion, don't invest. But let me tell you a secret. The venture capitalists who are funding that — they don't care if it's successful. What are they looking for? What is their primary goal? Exactly. And how do they make money? They have an IPO, and all you suckers buy the stock in something that will go nowhere, okay.

And how can I say that? Well, anybody know how I can say that? Do you know what the current price of 3D printed powder metal parts are? General Electric just spent 400 million dollars to buy Concept Laser, right, okay. So they believe in this — well, 400 million dollars worth, which for them is just chump change. But how much does it cost with a Concept Laser per pound of product? No, nope. It costs about $10,000 a pound. Go price it, okay. I priced it, okay. And I know — a paper, one of my students who's up at Lawrence Livermore, he's got the data on this. And the fabricated cost of a titanium part is about $10,000 a pound. I guarantee you I could make a part like this — now, not always the same geometry. Oh, you know, there are certain advantages, it's sort of like nanotechnology. But anybody who thinks that — they're focusing — as I understand them now, they're forming or whatever, they're trying to focus on automotive. Well, you're gonna find the value of a pound saved in the automotive industry is two dollars a pound. And they got to drop that from $10,000 a pound to — good luck.

Now if they're gonna make space parts at $10,000 a part, it's okay. But — or they can make automotive parts — the part I saw waved about, four or five pounds, and it cost $37,000. It was for a race car, okay. And someone will pay $37,000 for a small titanium part that's unique, okay. Anyway, so it's not what they say, it's what they don't say about some of these things. So keep it simple. And we always talk about keeping simple as being Occam's razor. But actually, Occam said — what he said, just translated loosely, was, "It's futile to do with more things what can be done with fewer." I think maybe he wasn't following his own advice, okay.

Anyway, so you can only cover one or two concepts in an hour, the rest is fluff — I've talked about that. There's some other teaching secrets. Numerical results are easier to grade than conceptual expositions, okay. That's why you get exams that have numerical results. The grader just goes "check," okay. If you have to read the Gettysburg Address to see if it's written well — particularly if it's handwritten — mmm, it's painful, okay.

Now I'm going to ask you a question. How many people here have been in a class where someone spent the entire hour doing a derivation? Yes. And why did they do that? No — because they always make a mistake, right? Has anyone ever been in a class where they didn't make a mistake? Okay. I will tell you why. My first — my second semester on the faculty, my first year on the faculty, I was teaching a graduate course in deformation processing. I'd been traveling for a couple of days, I came back, I had a nine o'clock class, and I hadn't prepared it very well. And so I looked in the book, and there was the derivation. I said, oh, I can just do this derivation in class. And it hit me — they do the derivation because they didn't have time to prepare a lecture, okay. That's why they do it. And I promise, I did do that derivation that day. But I promised myself I would never do a derivation in class again. If I needed a derivation and it wasn't in the book, I would do it on paper, I would hand it out, and after they had the thing — because you can follow the algebra, right, and I probably won't make the mistake on paper that I do on the board — let's talk about what it means, okay. And so I have never, after that first year, done a derivation in class. And so next time you take class and the professor spends the hour doing a derivation, go up to them after class and say, "I know why you did that derivation," and you'll see if you can lower your grade. Anyway, okay.

There's a guy — and I'm kind of big on communications and learning how to communicate. There's a guy, Edward Tufte at Yale University, who has made a small fortune on how to communicate in writing and visuals and graphical displays and stuff. And I actually took his one-day course once. He charges $500, and he got about 200 people, okay. So there's $100,000. Now, he had to rent the hall, didn't give you lunch, okay. But he was making a lot of money that day, okay. But the one thing I remember — aside from the fact that, when I learned, he was one of the most arrogant people I've ever met — but he had Sir Francis Bacon's [Isaac Newton's] copy of Newton's Principia, and he would have people — he had to pay these people, with their white gloves, and they would go around, they'd been down the aisles and you could look, don't touch, okay, at these rare books. He liked to collect rare books, okay. And so he would try to impress you with his rare books. But one thing I remember he said: fuzzy writing is usually a result of fuzzy thinking, okay.

And I'm gonna ask you to read — there's a number of things, if you want to read things, you won't be quizzed on them. But he wrote an article called "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint." It's on the web, you can read it. And I actually think there's some worthwhile questions in there. He tells the story of Lou Gerstner's first day at IBM, when he became chairman of IBM, and how he turned off the PowerPoint projector and told people, "Let's just talk about your business," okay. And IBM was a PowerPoint economy, okay. Everybody — no one could communicate unless they did it with PowerPoint. He doesn't — he liked PowerPoint, you'll find out. He does have — there's something called "Auto Content Wizard," or there used to be in PowerPoint. And so he took the Gettysburg Address and put it into PowerPoint, and showed how you could take one of the great pieces of English literature and turn it into pure pap, okay, with PowerPoint. So anyway, you can read that. And what you'll find is, the best presenters use no visual aids at all, okay. And we'll talk about that in a second. But you've got to remember it's okay to use visual aids — you're probably not one of the best yet, okay, so far as that goes.

Effective communications are equal to working hard in enhancing your career. If you can't tell other people what you have learned through your hard work, it's worthless, okay. You might as well not have done it. You can impress yourself, but you're not going to impress anybody else unless you can communicate it.

So I have an article — you have to know, first of all, you have to know who you're writing for, okay. There's an article that I wrote. Joel Clarke was asked to write an article on the World Trade Center a couple weeks after it collapsed, and he said, "Oh, that's Tom Eagar." So the journal editor called me in. I was so sick of hearing the news reports about the steel melted. I'd been to fire scenes — no steel melts in a regular fire, and I knew that. So I wrote an article. And I spent about three hours writing this paper, and within six months it was the most requested or most read article on the World Trade Center, and it stayed there for about nine years, okay, even ahead of the government report and stuff. And the reason is because I knew who I was writing it for. When I sat down to write this, I said, I'm gonna write this for a good high school science student. I want to write it so that people can understand it. People — you don't have to be a scientist to understand this. And so as a result, a lot of people liked it and could understand it. But also the result — a lot of people hate me, okay. They put articles — there are whole websites out, and they were writing to the president of MIT saying I should lose my tenure, he's just a government shill, okay. Anybody knows me — and I'm not a government shill. Anyway.

So there are some things on there to read if you want to know my part of the material selection and economics in six pages — here it is. "Materials for the 21st Century Defense Needs" — I was on this National Research Council committee, and of course these people were all, "We're gonna make tanks out of titanium and we're gonna use composite submarines and all this other stuff." Notice another thing — that a bunch of pipe dreams — these guys don't know what things cost, and we will talk about some of those things. And so I wrote basically what was my course on material selection in six pages. So if you want to read the short version, you don't have to watch the twelve modules. You can do a one-page — you know, here it is, okay, in six pages. They put it in an appendix because it wouldn't fit in the main part because it basically — too much of what the report said, okay.

What can I say. There's an article on the future of metals — I wrote this in the early 90s, because the ceramists were taking over the world. They were going to make high-temperature engines out of ceramics because they could go to higher temperatures, and they don't corrode. Well, maybe they don't corrode, but they do suffer degradation in different environments. There's things like — I have an article from the Faculty Newsletter that I wrote a number of years ago to try to make sure that Bob Brown didn't get to be president of MIT. He's now president of Boston University. So — but he was bad news. Anyway, there are some other things I could go over. And so these initial reading assignments are there. And we've run out of time, but there are some things to read — more than you could ever want to read in this first week. So we'll see you tomorrow or the next day or whatever.