08/02/06

MIT Post Graduate (1950-1955)

Having done a groundbreaking bachelor thesis in the Low Temperature Lab I was the darling of Professors John Slater, Will Allis and Mel Herlin. I was offered a salaried position as research assistant and doctoral candidate in the low temperature lab, with some teaching thrown in. Jerrold Zacharias and Al Hill also offered me a position in the molecular beam lab, but cryogenics was my prime interest, and I had already established myself in Mel Herlin’s low temperature lab. John King chose molecular beams. I taught one recitation section in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics under Slater and Herlin, using their McGraw-Hill textbook, still in mimeographed form.

In the summer of 1952 I was chosen to teach a class of Navy officers assigned to the nuclear carriers and submarines the thermodynamics they would need to manage the steam plants. They were the 20 or 30 most motivated students I ever had the pleasure of teaching. Little did I know that I would later be developing electromagnetic catapults for nuclear carriers, nor that I would be working with the son of Prof William Locke, head of the language department. Bill Locke Jr was the chief engineering officer on the fourth Nimitz class carrier, and the first nuclear carrier, USS Theodore Roosevelt, (CVN-71), when I spent several days aboard in 1987 studying catapult

operations. More later, see Electro Magnetic Launch Research chapter.

Looking for a challenge, as usual, I found one for my doctoral thesis. .The superfluidity of liquid helium below its lambda point temperature of 1.2 Kelvins was the leading challenge, both experimentally and theoretically. Helium-II is a so-called Bose-Einstein condensate in phase space, a macroscopic quantum phenomenon. In a nutshell, my experiment consisted in supporting a steel cylinder magnetically in superfluid helium, driving it into slow rotation , and measuring the rate at which it coasted to a standstill. This would have taken an infinite length of time if the helium was undisturbed and the viscosity was truly zero, a very crucial question with fundamental implications. I could only make measurements in the wee hours of the morning between subway trains, because even vibrations from the tracks at Kendall Square, three miles away, disturbed my helium bath on its pneumatically supported stand.

Elizabeth often helped me with all-nighters by manually stabilizing the vacuum over my helium bath. She joked the rest of her life that I had only married her because I needed a fourth order servo-mechanism (namely a human). Electronics in the fifties were not beyond second order servos.

My research took from 1950 to 1954, and led to the discovery of quantized vorticity I published my thesis in Physical Review Vol 102 No 3 pp 607-613, 1956. I am still somewhat annoyed that my discovery was all but forgotten, and that Wolfgang Ketterle won the 2002 Nobel Prize for observing the "first" Bose Einstein condensate in potassium. But Wolfgang agreed to reference my earlier work in his publications, and all is forgiven.

My thesis work was interrupted only by marriage and our honeymoon in 1953. By then MIT had a beautiful ,music library with eight piano practice rooms, and I practiced whenever I wasn’t working on my thesis, running the MIT translation service, or backpacking with Elizabeth in the White or Green Mountains or on Mount Katahdin in Maine.

After finishing her MS in linguistics at Harvard, Elizabeth got a job helping Doctor Grant do research in the ophthalmology lab at the Mass General Eye and Ear Infirmary. specifically on glaucoma. Elizabeth got quite brazen about killing laboratory rabbits, and we often had one for dinner. Those were lean years.

After finishing my thesis I toured the country for job interviews and was offered jobs at Bell Labs, IBM Labs, and Stanford University. I accepted a job at MIT Lincoln Lab although it offered the lowest salary. Both Elizabeth and I had roots in New England. The Boston area offered more of what we both liked than any other area in the world, and I valued my MIT colleagues more than higher salary. I accepted a job in the solid state division of the newly created Lincoln Laboratory, so named because it had just moved from Cambridge to its brand new quarters in Lincoln.

Our impending wealth inspired elaborate summer plans. We bought a brand new motorcycle, a Triumph Tiger 110, to tour Europe with, and plans to look for a home on our return before starting work in fall. Elizabeth, forever optimistic, thought we might find a home in the two weeks before our scheduled departure. We did, and cancelled the Europe trip. . Weir Meadow became the focus of our lives. It consumed all our spare time, all our money, and much of our energy for the next decade or two. See the Weir Meadow chapter for details

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