§1. Course logistics and prerequisites [00:52]
So how many people are sophomores or juniors? Seniors? How many graduates? Any aero-astro? Two people, or supposedly management. I just want to get a general feel for things.
My name is Tom Eagar. I've been teaching some version of this course for a little over thirty years. It started out as 3.37, then we put a one at the end for some reason that I don't understand, and that's the graduate course of course three. There's the graduate course of course two, and these are basically joint courses. A couple years ago I asked for an undergraduate course number and they gave me an experimental course number. They've gotten too complex on the numbering system for me to figure out. But in any case it's basically the same course.
It says it has prerequisites at the undergraduate level. I don't consider it has prerequisites, but the department said I should have prerequisites, so it's just easier to do what they say. I've taught this course for people in industry, and I've had people with high school degrees take the course and get something out of it. I've had people with philosophy degrees or psychology degrees taking the course. It's partly that I have a different philosophy about teaching.
I came to MIT as a freshman in 1968, got my doctorate here, went off for about two years in industry, came back as a faculty member, and have been on the faculty for something like thirty years. About ten or fifteen years ago when I stepped down as department head and turned 50, I said I'm just going to enjoy myself for the rest of my career. I'm not going to play these silly little games. I'm going to teach the way I want, and I don't care what the rest of the Institute says about that.
§2. Teaching philosophy and the no-exams approach [04:22]
The problem I had with the way we teach, I realized about twenty-five years ago. I went down to have breakfast with my children, who were in high school at the time, and they had their math book on the kitchen table. I looked through it and they had two pages on derivatives, two pages on integrals, two pages on exponentials. I had never known that mathematics came in two-page units — a uniformity, two pages on every topic. There were 120 topics in that book and obviously they would do one topic a day. All they were doing was preparing the students to take the SATs. They weren't trying to teach the math; they were trying to teach them to pass an exam. To a certain extent that's what I saw at MIT, except the problem at MIT is you got here knowing how to take exams.
So there are no exams in this course, which upsets some people because they really would like to show how much smarter they are than their classmates by passing an exam. I can lecture on whatever I want. And I would much prefer that you ask a question and have me see if I can spend a half an hour answering your question in more detail than you ever thought possible. I've been doing this for thirty years; I've heard the lectures; I know what I'm going to say and I'm sort of bored with it myself. It's not actually that boring for you because most of you will have heard it for the first time, but I would much rather address a question than file through whatever I have as an outline in my notes. So please ask questions. If you don't understand something, say it.
I learned a number of years ago, back around 1990, I was on a committee — actually part of LFM [Leaders for Manufacturing], which is the predecessor of LGO. John Little, an Institute Professor at Sloan School, chaired the committee, and he called it the Do Something committee, which I liked because I've been on plenty of do-nothing committees. We were supposed to look at distance education. Stanford already had what they call tutored video instruction. They videotaped a regular class at Stanford, sent the videotapes — this is the 1980s — out to some Intel or Hewlett-Packard site in Colorado or Arizona. They would have a group of five or ten students watching the video at a convenient time in some conference room at the company site. They would select one student who might have a PhD in the subject, who they called the tutor. Or they might take a student taking the course at the same time.
They found the students who took TVI courses did better than the students on campus. There have been a number of studies since then. Taking things by delayed video instruction, students get better comprehension than if they do it in the classroom. We determined out of John Little's committee that General Motors had asked, for the welding course I taught, that in 1990 you can get a master's degree by essentially doing something like the Stanford TVI program — get it from RPI, or Purdue, or Iowa. But MIT had never given credit at a distance in 1990. So we determined that we would take twenty students at GM Tech Center, I would videotape my lectures, and MIT agreed to go to the Provost to get permission to take the tuition money — about forty thousand dollars from those twenty students — to GM.
I had to take everything over to Building 9 every morning at about five-thirty in the morning, lecture at seven-thirty, videotape it, provide breakfast for the students on campus, and send it to General Motors. I told the GM guys from the very beginning, since you're not in class, ask me one question a week. You can fax me, email me, call me — but I want every student, all twenty of them, to ask me twenty questions a week. About halfway through the semester I had one question. Then General Motors paid for me to go out and meet with the students. I said how come I didn't get any questions, and they said, look, we understand you. We just play the tape back a second time, and usually it makes sense. So I realized it's not that the faculty are incoherent — we just think they're incoherent because our attention span over fifty minutes lapses. You miss a little bit when you're getting it live. But when you get it by delayed video, you can stop, replay it, and follow along. That's why the tutored video Stanford students were doing better.
Over the next couple years I was doing this for General Motors, and students would call up, "I'm sick, Professor Eagar," or "I've got a conference," and I'd say, just watch the movie. We lost the GM funding because GM lost twenty-three billion dollars one quarter. But I decided to videotape lectures. I pay out of my pocket to videotape my lectures, and I have been for the last twenty-five years, because it means you can watch the movie if you can't make the class. There are people who take this class who never come except to do their report presentation. I remember one student evaluated the course and said they watched it while they were fixing dinner. I thought that was a great evaluation.
§3. The student presentation requirement [12:15]
What you have to do in this course is a presentation. It could be on anything you want, a live presentation. We have thirty or forty students. I used to say, well, we're talking about structural materials, you should be on a structural material. Then I found, whatever you're interested in, you will do a better job presenting on something you're interested in. Most of the students who are here are here because they're interested in something about science and technology. I've had people talk about fancy doorknobs, Gothic arches, pole vault poles — which I find quite interesting, composites, the stiffness, the modulus. Any topic you want.
But you've only got ten minutes. That means no 110 overheads. And I don't want you to say how General Motors builds cars in ten overheads, that's a little broad. Or how Boeing builds airplanes. Pick something a little more specific. I had a very interesting one a couple years ago, a student from Mexico who talked about adobe bricks, because that's how they build homes in Mexico. Adobe — just mud and straw. Remember Moses and the Pharaoh who said you can't make bricks without straw? You take mud and straw, it's a composite material, it's a structural material. Instead of using regular mud they often use cow manure, because it keeps the flies away. I've learned a lot, and if you look at the student evaluations, students feel like they learn as much from the student presentations as they do from the lectures.
Until last year I could say I'd only given two grades in thirty years, A's and B's. Last year I actually gave some C's. That's because two students got up and gave me the Wall Street Journal approach to materials. It's garbage, absolute garbage. When I was in the LFM program, I sat in Eric Vrede's lecture — they have these big lecture halls with tiers, and they have name cards in front, business-school approach. A number of students were sitting there reading their Wall Street Journal. I made some comment: if you're reading The Wall Street Journal, it's no longer news. I think they're reading The Wall Street Journal to find out what the latest and greatest technology is. What would you find if you were reading The Wall Street Journal nowadays about materials? Additive manufacturing, nanotechnology, biotech. Very rarely would you hear something exciting about steel or copper.
§4. Teaching style: stories, derivations, and lecture preparation [16:05]
What we're going to do in my part of the course is talk about steel, but I spell it with two E's, not S-T-E-E-L. I will tell you some secrets I learned as a young faculty member about how teaching is done. How many of you have ever been to a class where the professor spent the entire hour doing a derivation? You know why? Because they didn't have time to prepare a lecture. I realized that my first year on the faculty. I'd been traveling, I was teaching a graduate course on deformation processing. I came in that morning, hadn't really prepared the lecture, trying to figure out what I was going to do at nine o'clock. And the light went off — oh, that's why the professors would go up there and spend a whole hour filling the board and confusing the students or putting them asleep. I swore to myself, thirty-seven years ago, I'd never do another derivation in class. Whenever the derivation was in a book, I would write it out, copy it, and hand it out to the students, saying, here's how you derive this formula, let's talk about what it means. Who cares about doing the algebra?
So why should I bore everyone? I can tell you stories, and the stories aren't always accurate, but it's my story. So if I'm wrong, this is a fantasy I've been on. We're supposed to be talking about structural materials. There are three of us — Dr. Sadoway and Dr. Allmer, who will be lecturing tomorrow. I'll be in today and Friday, Sadoway tomorrow, Allmer next week beginning Thursday. You have to do three modules in this course. If you look on Stellar, you'll see the syllabus — Monday through Friday nine to ten, through about mid-April. They front-load this course. Since there are no exams, since you don't have to read anything except what you want to read, I will give you plenty of reading on Stellar if you want it. One student's evaluation a number of years ago: "You can get a lot out of this course or a little." That's fine. If you want to pay this kind of tuition and get nothing out of it, be my guest. You can probably pass this course without doing much, but hopefully we'll make it interesting and you'll want to do something.
There'll be two lectures live. I will do material selection this semester, and Dr. Sadoway does what he calls hands-on materials science. My assistant Cheryl Hill likes to help students, so if you need to come see me, I tend to get in about seven o'clock in the morning and go home about three o'clock — traffic. Sixteen years ago I stepped down from administration and said I'm going to enjoy myself for the rest of my career.
[Tom puts up a slide listing enrolled students.] This is the list of students that the Registrar said is taking the course. The ones in yellow are taking this course for the second or third time. Tracy's a junior, she's taking it for the third time. She videotaped it last year — I actually paid people to do the videotaping. I lost my lecture on codes and standards, which is what I'm going to do in this course, so she's going to go back and re-take notes. She just watched codes and standards at home on her computer screen. By the way, these are all essentially now on YouTube. So if you couldn't make the streaming, you don't have to download. You can see when Dr. Sadoway talks, when I talk, what the subjects were. We've been putting this stuff on YouTube since 2011, and I could go back to 1986 videos.
Welding is my own research area, that I got tenure in. Manufacturing is what I've been doing, since I've always been interested in structural materials. As long as you take three different modules, you have a pass on the course. Someone could take a module of course one, or course three, or course two. So we're going to, unless both of us are out of town one day, have class every day of the week, and we'll finish up some time before spring break. We might even start your presentations before spring break.
I have to watch all of the thirty-some presentations, so I usually have the students watch three presentations a day. By the way, this is one of the reasons I can get more students — because a lot of students can't take a class with a thousand conflicts. I have students from course 15, course 4, course 3, often a mechanical engineer or aero-astro, but I typically have students from five or six departments. What time can you find that they can all meet? Years ago when we tried to do this before the Institute was quite as flexible, the only time everyone could meet was four o'clock on Friday. By doing asynchronous lecturing — you can watch the video — we don't have to worry about that. Any questions?
§5. The What is Engineering? module and survival kit [25:24]
I told you about the grades, I told you about the requirements in the syllabus. There are some handouts that will be on Stellar that you can read. I actually now use this course to try to figure out some things that I've always tried to figure out. Last fall I taught a course called What is Engineering? Because I've always wondered, what is the difference between science and engineering? I always liked Theodore von Kármán, who said that scientists discover that which exists; engineers create that which never was. He was one of the greatest scientists and engineers in the United States in the twentieth century. He founded the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech. They explained why the Wright brothers were successful from a scientific point of view. I came up with four pages of quotes from different people. This will be posted; you can read it. At the end of the semester I basically came up with: science seeks to increase human knowledge, engineering seeks to improve the human condition. That's my definition of the difference between science and engineering. It turns out there are huge differences in the attitude of scientists and engineers. If you want to hear about philosophy, what is engineering, you should take that module.
This is something I put together — I'm trying to write a book. In the book I wrote the epilogue early on, and it's a survival kit, my key lessons learned. This is a summary of some of the things I learned as a student at MIT. Number one: be humble but don't be humiliated. Humility comes from within; humiliation is imposed upon you by others. We find at MIT a lot of this stuff. It has nothing to do with structural materials selection. But I wrote an article for the faculty newsletter about leadership, management, education, et cetera. I wrote it about ten or eleven years ago, when Bob Brown was my chief Provost — he's now president of Boston University. When I wrote this for the faculty newsletter, it was about thirty-some years at MIT and what I had observed. A lot of alumni sent me notes saying, wow, that's right on. It talks about the strengths of MIT and weaknesses.
§6. Writing about the World Trade Center collapse [29:04]
We talked about communications. When I started as a young faculty member, my department head Walter Owen brought me in and said, no matter what anyone else does, publish or perish. So I published papers and graduate students and research articles. But what happened is, after the World Trade Center collapse, about three weeks afterwards, Joel Clark got a request from the editor of a metallurgical journal saying, will you write an article about the World Trade Center collapse? Joel said, well, ask Tom Eagar. So they asked, would you write an article for the Journal of Metals, JOM? This was published in December 2001. It took me about three or four weeks to gather some information and write this article. Christopher Musso, my graduate student, helped me with some research, so he's co-author. The reason I was willing to write it: I was sick of hearing all the misinformation and incorrect information that was in the press.
I used to read Time magazine in high school religiously every week. I got to MIT in the middle of the Vietnam War demonstrations, and for the first time in my life I was right in the presence of some of the news. When I would read what was said in Time magazine compared to what I saw, I realized there was no correlation whatsoever. Time magazine is incomplete fantasies, complete fiction, and I quit reading it. Every now and then someone will tell me, oh, there's an article in Time, I'll go read it, and it's complete fiction. Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, they're all fictional. They have nothing to do with reality. I only know a couple of magazines that I think are reasonably accurate.
I will spend a lot of time talking to reporters with the idea that I want them to get it right. So I agreed to write this article. I spent three hours writing it. I sometimes say, what can you say in nothing at all about something? It turns out you can stay quiet if you know the basics. I knew the basic physics, and I knew the chemistry with fuel combustion because I'm a welding engineer and because I've done fire investigations. The reason I agreed to write it: I know you don't melt steel in a fire. Everybody said, oh, the fire was so hot it melted the steel, that's why the World Trade Center came down. I knew that wasn't true. So I had to research it. The guys over in civil engineering were giving a seminar about it. I got permission to tape it, watched their seminar, and they were misreading.
I wrote the article with the idea that I was writing it for high school science students. I wasn't trying to be flowery or complex; I wrote it so someone with a little bit of education could understand. That's part of my philosophy about teaching. A lot of faculty try to make something so complex to prove how much smarter they are than you. A good teacher makes things as simple as possible because they realize the students are probably smarter than them. I certainly know that many of my students are smarter than me. I entered MIT as a freshman in the bottom third of my class. I had terrible preparation in high school, and I'm not really all that smart in a lot of ways. I hate to do derivations and I hate to do problem sets, so I don't make the students. But for the first ten or eleven years after the World Trade Center, if you Googled "WTC collapse," this was the number one hit. Within a year there were websites out against me by the conspiracy theorists — the 9/11 truthers. They hate me, because people can understand this. They're sure there was a conspiracy. I can explain every physical phenomenon they talk about much more simply than they can, if you just go back to the basis of science.
In 1988, Lester Thurow became dean of Sloan School of Management. He wanted to build bridges to the School of Engineering. We had at the time a program for senior executives at Sloan, a nine-week intensive program. You lived out at MIT Endicott House. You paid $50,000 tuition for nine weeks, and Sloan School faculty would come in and teach you eight hours a day, six days a week. Most of them — I was the only academic out of fifty there — were 45 to 60 years old. Many were CEOs of companies, with a couple guys from General Motors. At General Motors, a manager is typically running a billion-dollar business. One of them was in charge of all the lighting for all the cars — that's a several-billion-dollar business. It's called the Advanced Management Program, AMP, generally thirteen weeks. A company sends back someone who has never had real business school training, gives them some training, and then they have the imprimatur of the business school.
About a week before Christmas, Sloan sent around a note saying any engineering faculty member who would like to take this nine-week intensive program starting in February — they're going to give one scholarship and waive tuition, $50,000. I thought, I've taken some business courses. So I applied. I suspect I was the only person out of 350 engineering faculty who applied, so I got it. It's like my mother coming in third in the French contest in high school — it turns out only three people showed up. I got selected because I was probably the only person willing to clear my schedule for five weeks straight. So I went through Sloan, took this program.
Lester at the time was rich. He had written books — The Zero-Sum Society — he was on Meet the Press and Face the Nation. He called himself an economics educator; his colleagues at Sloan economics department called him Less Than Thorough, because he was a little simple about things. Lester came in, and at that time, 1988, he was getting a thirty-thousand-dollar lecture fee — sort of like Hillary getting paid by a board of directors. Thirty thousand dollars in the 1980s was a lot. Lester was a very engaging speaker. They were all enamored with him.
The second time he came in — he came in twice in the nine weeks — I was just analyzing what was it about his communication style that made him such an engaging speaker. Everyone else was still enamored, reveling in his words, pearls of wisdom from Lester. I was trying to analyze it. When he finished, I realized he didn't say anything. But it was elegant.
That was a great turning point in my career. I used to go to conferences and talk about technical details and what I'd been doing research on — a couple of differential equations to impress everybody. After that I decided, just think of the right way to say it. In 1989 I had to give a keynote talk on resistance spot welding at the welding conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. I got up to give this keynote and I said: they put three thousand spot welds in the average automobile because you need two thousand good ones. That's something people will remember. A year later I was at a welding conference at a cocktail party, and right behind me I heard someone say, "you know they put three thousand spot welds in an average automobile because you need two thousand good ones." It's not what you say, it's how you say it.
I still love Lester's line. A couple years later he was at the Cambridge Marriott, talking to people in industry, lamenting that we lose some of our top faculty at Sloan School to other business schools. We all knew he was sort of talking about Robert Merton. Merton worked with Black and Scholes on derivatives. Those guys worked out the math for derivatives trading. Robert Merton left MIT and went up to Harvard Business School. He won the Nobel Prize for what he did with Black-Scholes. Lester never mentioned Merton by name, but he said: fortunately, "they tend to hire our extinct volcanoes."
You don't have to explain what he's talking about. It was a metaphor that speaks for itself. So I learned it's not what you say, it's how you say it. Keep it simple, stupid. That's basically what this article is about. If you're interested, you can read it. I will stand by this article fifteen years later as being correct, because I just talked about the fundamental physics.
If you read this thing you'll find that the reason the first tower went down — it wasn't because they had a fire; we've had fires in skyscrapers before. It was the first time we'd had a fire with 20,000 gallons of fuel all on one floor. Each floor is about an acre in size. Ordinarily in a fire in a building, you start over in one corner, and by the time it gets to the far corner, everything in the first corner has burned out and is starting to cool down and get its strength back. Whereas in this case we heated up everything all at once. All the steel lost seventy percent of its strength. That was enough to explain everything. I knew it — that's why the truthers hated me.
Guess what was in Building Seven? It was the emergency control station for the city of New York. It had a 20,000-gallon tank of diesel fuel to run emergency generators. It had diesel fuel piped all through the building. So as it caught on fire, the fuel lines started getting violated. The building had a huge fire — 20,000 gallons of fuel inside the building. So don't put swimming pools of diesel fuel in your buildings, because if they catch on fire, the muscle flexes. It fell down for the exact same reason: a huge fire all at once, as opposed to a smaller progressive fire.
You're going to have to get used to my giving a preface to get to the punch line. I have to explain it well. The truthers are right — we've had fires in other skyscrapers but they didn't all come down. But we never had someone fly 20,000 gallons of jet fuel into the building, all at once. So Building Seven failed for the same reason, but it wasn't a jet — it was another source of 20,000 gallons of fuel. All three of them had 20,000 gallons of fuel, and no one had ever designed for an extra 20,000 gallons of fuel. So in my opinion that's the reason.
It turns out the US government spent several hundred million dollars investigating this. The guy who was in charge of the investigation had been a faculty member at MIT and didn't get tenure, went out, and became head of the fire investigation team for the NIST World Trade Center study. If you read the article, it's four pages — they wanted me to give more detail, but it's still questionable. Other questions?
§7. Structural vs. functional materials [46:09]
We're going to start talking about structural materials. First, a couple of things. [Tom shows a cartoon.] I've been using this cartoon for a number of years at the graduate school of business. I know you all want to make money, but today we're going to discuss making things. The student says, things? I don't want to make things. The next one says, I want to make money. The third one says, listen, let's go to the business school, we can make some money that way. That's part of the philosophy nowadays.
There are various types of materials. This is a course on structural materials, as opposed to functional materials. The Japanese sort of coined this word, functional materials. Structural materials are used in very large quantities, and they're used, by definition, for their mechanical properties: tensile, compressive, shear.
Functional materials are often very small volumes, and they're used for a multitude of properties which can be chemical, magnetic, electrical, optical, thermal. You can start adding two properties together: piezoelectric. What's piezoelectric? Mechanical force gives you electricity, or vice versa — electricity gives you a mechanical displacement. That's how the Navy does sonar: they put electrical waves into a piezoelectric material and get a displacement out that moves the waves. Magnetothermic, to try to figure out ways to make more efficient refrigerators. Thermoelectric, electrochemical — the list could go on forever. When you're talking functional materials, you might be talking about materials that are worth millions of dollars an ounce. But you might be using micrograms, because some of these things are catalysts.
[Tom shows images of structural applications.] When we're talking about structural materials, we're talking about things like ships, reactors. All-composite aircraft — this is the first large all-composite aircraft, the V-22 Osprey. The Marine helicopter, about 60 million a pop, is all graphite carbon fiber composite. Could not fly without that material. Try to make something heavy like aluminum — too heavy. So they have to use a very expensive material. This was the X-33 space plane. This is a piece of the X-33 hydrogen tank, fabricated for twelve thousand dollars a pound. It's not very heavy but that's the price.
§8. The value of a pound saved [49:36]
One of the things we're going to learn is that I talk about structural materials because we use them in large volumes, and we want to know how much it's going to cost to build something. If you're talking about a spacecraft, the value of a pound saved is twenty thousand dollars a pound for material in Earth orbit. People want to talk about colonizing the moon. Well, at twenty thousand dollars a pound, I don't think we're going to be sending a lot of people up in space. If you pay several million dollars to the Russians they'll give you a ride up into space. But it's expensive to get payload into space.
What's the value of a pound saved in a car? Two dollars. What's the value of a pound saved in a commercial aircraft like a Boeing 737? Two hundred dollars. What's the value of a pound saved in a railroad car? Twenty cents a pound. So we have orders of magnitude — railroad cars to commercial aircraft to spacecraft. The space shuttle was supposed to get the price of payload into orbit down. Back in the 1970s it was ten thousand dollars a pound. They were supposed to drop the price to a thousand dollars a pound with the space shuttle. If you look over the thirty-year life of the space shuttle, it came in at about thirty thousand dollars a pound. It was more expensive because they had a couple of failures — they got very expensive. So the price of a material is very important, but it's not the dominant factor in selection.
When we say one pound saved in a car is worth two dollars, what do we mean by that? If I have a Ford Fiesta and I look at the mileage and I say it's going to have a hundred thousand mile life before it's ready to scrap — there are curves showing weight versus mileage. You can take the slope of that and say, if I took 100 pounds out, how much gasoline would I save you over 100,000 miles? It's about two hundred dollars worth of gasoline per 100-pound savings. That's two dollars a pound saved. The calculations differ for a spacecraft and an aircraft. Commercial aircraft typical life is a hundred thousand hours. If you look at how much fuel is burned per hour versus the weight — you can plot a bunch of aircraft, weight versus pounds of fuel — you'll get the same type of curve as cars, but now per 100,000 hours of operation. Typically because of fatigue cracks and other things, after a hundred thousand hours they send them out to the desert. You can get spare parts out of there if you need. That's two hundred dollars a pound.
It used to be they put magazines on airplanes for the passengers to read. Vice presidents decide how many magazines and which magazines, because at two hundred dollars a pound, you have to carry them over the life. Coffee pots in the galley — they're very cost-conscious about those things. It's worth two hundred dollars a pound. That's very different than an automobile at two dollars a pound. Very different from a railroad at twenty cents a pound. For a spacecraft, it's about twenty thousand dollars a pound payload into orbit. If you want to send up a telecommunication satellite, you weigh the satellite and figure how many millions it cost you — a hundred million dollars to send it up — you're going to find about twenty thousand dollars a pound.
So there are different criteria, but when you're talking about the value of a pound saved, that's the question. Remember, somebody running for president — maybe it was a president, twenty years ago — said: computer chips, potato chips, what's the matter with what we manufacture? So that's enough for today. Any questions? I'll be around every day.