"This Is M.I.T."

The world into which we were born is gone; we have little or no idea of the world into which our children may grow to maturity. It is this rate of change, even more than the change itself, that I see as the dominant fact of our time.

-M.I.T. President Julius A. Stratton

Close to a nuclear reactor lies a patient, his brain exposed to a beam of neutrons, while doctors watch through a window. On a dormitory roof a handful of students lift their wineglasses to toast the sunrise after an all-night question-and-answer session with a professor of aerodynamics. In a laboratory a computer expert works on a pet project: developing an artificial nose that can smell. Around the campus, research teams study the sonar system of the bat in flight, assemble atoms into crystals capable of withstanding extraordinary stress, inquire into "the feasibility of controlling manipulative devices molded after human arms and hands by means of a general-purpose computer." And at their switchboards operators tirelessly greet the thousands of callers to UNiversity 4-6900 in Cambridge, Mass.: "This is M.I.T."

This week, with learned discussions and addresses by distinguished guests, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology celebrates its 100th anniversary. Established by Geologist William Barton Rogers, who promised that his school would be "founded on a thorough knowledge of scientific laws and principles," M.I.T. has more than met its mandate. Its job is to train scientists and technologists who can keep pace with the bewildering change that M.I.T.'s Stratton considers the dominant fact of modern life. Its methods are copied around the world; the Israel Institute of Technology, for example, is largely modeled after M.I.T. As perhaps no other institution's, M.I.T.'s interests and influence reach into U.S. Government, U.S. security and U.S. industry. Items:

P: Jerome Wiesner, famed director of M.I.T.'s Research Laboratory for Electronics, is now President Kennedy's chief scientific adviser. M.I.T. Corp. Chairman James R. Killian Jr. was President Eisenhower's top science adviser from 1957 to 1959. M.I.T. President Karl T. Compton (1930-48) and M.I.T.'s Vannevar Bush were top scientific advisers to Roosevelt during World War II.

P: In M.I.T.'s wartime Radiation Lab was done the major U.S. work in developing radar. From M.I.T.'s Instrumentation Lab came advanced gyroscopic bombsights and the inertial guidance systems for the Polaris missile and nuclear submarines. M.I.T.'s Lincoln Lab worked out the U.S.'s DEW line early-warning system against attack by enemy aircraft, the SAGE system to coordinate retaliation, and the BMEWS system for warning against enemy missiles. At M.I.T.'s Millstone Hill field station at Westford, Mass., is the 84-ft. dish antenna that has bounced radar pulses off the planet Venus. In all, M.I.T. operates $50.8 million worth of installations for the Government.

P: One of every five M.I.T. graduates is either president or vice president of the company he works for. In Massachusetts alone, 75 companies have been founded by M.I.T. graduates. The electronics industry, which far exceeds waning textiles as Massachusetts' biggest industry, got much of its basic vitality from M.I.T. U.S. Route 128, familiarly known as "Electronics Gulch," is lined with companies headed and staffed by M.I.T. graduates and professors.

M.I.T. is, of course, proud of such credentials. But 'M.I.T.'s faculty members are the first to protest that headline-making achievement is only a by-blow of M.I.T.'s real purpose: that of producing scientists and technologists able to cope with and lead an epoch of thunderbolt change. Can they be mass-trained? At M.I.T., with its 6,300 students (including 154 coeds rather chillily referred to as "the women students"), the answer is yes. But how? M.I.T.'s answer lies in its willingness to change itself.

Part of the Kit. For decades, M.I.T. was famed as the leader in nuts-and-bolts engineering education. But today its emphasis has turned from teaching how to build bigger bridges or better mousetraps, and has come to stress basic science. "Educating a person for a current technology or a current art just doesn't make sense any more," says Professor Ascher Shapiro. Referring to his own field of mechanical engineering, he explains: "Now we are concentrating less on the technological art and more on engineering science: thermo dynamics, flow dynamics, electromagnetic theory--things which will be part of a man's kit no matter what he goes into."

But in underlining basic science, there is always the danger that the student will be unable to bridge the gap between principle and practice. M.I.T.'s faculty members are endlessly ingenious in devising ways to demonstrate actual use for the abstract. The result: a sort of do-it-your self system of science teaching.

An example is the senior-year aerodynamics course taught by Associate Professor Erik Molloe-Christensen. First, Molloe-Christensen holds a lottery, and the number each student draws corresponds to something in the lab--a piece of wire, a piece of plastic tubing or of plywood. Working in pairs, the students are required to determine the modulus of elasticity of the material they drew. Two students, working with a piece of brass, determined its elasticity by measuring the speed at which sound passed along it. Explains Molloe-Christensen: "They can do it any way they want to--so long as they find out." On another project, two students chose to study the "time constant for cooling a bottle of Coca-Cola in ice water." They thought it would be a cinch--all they would need was a thermometer and a stop watch. But they found out differently. "It depends on whether you shake the bottle," says Molloe-Christensen. "Remember that little twist the wine steward gives the bottle when he puts it in a bucket? It speeds the cooling."

Assistant Professor Richard Thornton has still another method of teaching do-it-yourself science in his electrical engineering classes. He created a kit for his students consisting of a plastic pegboard and a plastic box full of tiny parts--200 resistors, 50 capacitors, 6 transistors, etc. About the size of a thin textbook, the kit costs $25--and with it several students, working together in their dormitory, can fashion such things as a digital computer or an elementary TV system.

"Tech Is Hell." Despite the fact that such imaginative teaching methods can often make fun out of the stiffest course, study at M.I.T. remains rigorous enough to satisfy the most demanding standards. M.I.T.'s freshmen are students who have ranked among the top 1 1/2% on college board math exams; they must carry five subjects, including physics, chemistry and math. The lights in the rooms on M.I.T.'s 115-acre campus remain aglow far into the night, and the M.I.T. student slogan is both a boast and a sigh: "Tech is hell!"

Yet M.I.T. is acutely aware of the increasing influence of science on society, and it makes every effort to prevent its students from becoming ivory-tower drudges. Says President Stratton: "Science and engineering no longer can be taken in isolation from the rest of the problems of our society--they are woven in the whole fabric of our industry, economy and federal life." With each passing year the humanities come in for greater attention at M.I.T.; its humanities faculty numbers some 120. Its economics department is one of the best, and M.I.T. Economists Walt Rostow and Paul Samuelson are among President Kennedy's top economic advisers.

Similarly, in its efforts to expose its students to the full life, M.I.T. encourages sports (although it has no football team) and other extracurricular activities. Since academic disciplines are so rigorous, M.I.T. deliberately avoids setting down rules for personal conduct. The students themselves police excessive noise, late parties and other public nuisances.

Products & Processes. As fast as it can, M.I.T. is adapting itself to meet the obvious but formidable demands of science's near future, in which the dividing lines between branches of science are rapidly being erased: the biologist should be something of a chemist, the chemist must know a lot about physics.

M.I.T. is moving toward a basic change in its organic structure. It is creating five "centers": for the life sciences, the earth sciences, materials research, communications, and aeronautics and astronautics. In the life sciences center, for" example, electrical engineers, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, medical men, biophysicists, biochemists, microbiologists and electron-microscope experts all pool their skills. The life sciences center is a prime customer for Chilean fishermen, who ship to Cambridge the nerve fibers of a giant squid found off Chile's coast. The size of the fibers makes them relatively easy to work with, and M.I.T.'s life scientists, combining their efforts, have become more or less familiar with most of the chemical molecules that make the fiber work. Their ultimate aim: to understand the basic nature of nerve impulses.

Such endeavor has made M.I.T. what it is. "The products and processes of science." M.I.T.'s Stratton has said, "dominate our industry and determine our economy; they affect our health and welfare; they have altered our role in the family of nations, and they will govern the conditions of war and peace. No one can remain impervious to these changes." Moving into its second century, M.I.T. is far from impervious to change.

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