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Title : standard furniture gardendale al
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interviewer: todayis july 26, 2011. i'm larry gallagher, and todaywe are in the mit studio speaking with paul penfield, aspart of the mit150 infinite history project. dr. penfield was born indetroit and grew up in birmingham, michigan. he attended college at amherst,majoring in physics and working as the chiefengineer on the college radio
station before entering mit in1955 for graduate work in electrical engineering. after receiving his doctoratein 1960, penfield joined the mit faculty in the departmentof electrical engineering. from 1989 to 1999, he servedas head of the electrical engineering and computer sciencedepartment, overseeing the creation of thegroundbreaking five-year master of electrical engineeringprogram, and organizing the commemorationof the famous building 20.
for his work on thecommemoration, he received the 1999 presidential citation fromthe association of alumni and alumnae of mit. professor penfield is a fellowof the ieee, and former chairman of the bostonsection. he received the ieee centennialmedal in 1984, the circuits and systems societydarlington prize paper in 1985, and the circuits andsystems society golden jubilee award in 1999.
he is author of five books anddozens of articles in his various fields of interest, fromelectrodynamics of moving media to noise andthermodynamics. dr. penfield retired from mitin june 2005, but still teaches a class for freshman. paul, thank you very muchfor taking the time to talk with us today. penfield: it's my pleasureto be here, larry. interviewer: so, paul, your iopprofile states that you
retired from mit in 2005, yetyou're still teaching six years later. why? penfield: because i love it. i spent my entirecareer at mit. mit is the kind ofplace where-- if you retire, you gooff and do nothing? that's just not likeus professors. retirement, after all, at anyuniversity, especially here at
mit, is really an inventionof the payroll office. that is, you don't get paidafter you retire. but you can still haveall the fun that you had as a professor. and i must say that my yearsspent here at mit have been enormously satisfying ina variety of ways. and i've simply had fun. i didn't want to stop. interviewer: great.
and you plan on teaching howfar into the future? penfield: only time will tell. interviewer: during your 50-plusyears at mit, you served the institutein a number of administrative positions. were you able to continueto teach throughout most of that time? penfield: i did not. some administrators--
paul gray, perhaps is thedominant example of someone who, while president, actuallytaught for our department. other department heads have hada policy of teaching one section of a class, perhapsof a minor nature, but nevertheless keeping theirhand in teaching. i discovered that icould not do that. and as a consequence, idevoted full time to administration at that time. interviewer: and what is thesubject matter, what interests
you right now about the coursethat you're teaching? penfield: well, the coursethat i'm teaching is an attempt to unify two differentbranches of science. my philosophy, if you like, indoing research is to try to simplify, simplify, simplify,make things easier to understand. and if i find that differentbranches of science use different terminology for thesame concept, why not teach them once instead of twice?
why not allow one field tobenefit from the knowledge gained in another field? and in this particular case,it's information theory, which is a branch of electricalengineering. and it's thermodynamics,especially the second law of thermodynamics, which is abranch of physics and other natural sciences, and is to myway of thinking perhaps the most glorious achievement thatscience has ever had in its multihundred-year history.
and here we have an instancein which the second law of thermodynamics, involving thisconcept called entropy, is extraordinarily difficultto understand. and some wits have said in thepast that everybody who thinks that they understand the secondlaw actually doesn't have a clue aboutwhat's going on. and that may verywell be true. however, people nowadays knowa lot more about information and how to quantify it and howto deal with it and how to
process it. and it turns out thatinformation and entropy really are the same concept, and insuitable structures can be traded one for another just theway mass and energy could be traded one for another. so why teach them twice? why not teach them together,and teach the differences between the two andsimplify things? so that's what i'mtrying to do.
and how is it that that course,that subject matter, is well suited towardmit freshman? penfield: we developed itspecifically for freshmen, and i was alarmed that ourcurriculum in electrical engineering and computer scienceno longer requires the students really to haveany direct contact with the second law. the second law, as you know,is unlike conservation laws such as the conservation ofenergy law, which says that
there's this quantity calledenergy which is conserved. and you can transform it, youcan move it from one place to another, but at the end of theday, there's still just as much left as there was at thebeginning of the day. entropy is unlike that, in thatentropy of the natural world only increases. it can never decrease,but it generally does not stay the same. it increases.
and that's a very mystifyingthing. i would say that the naturalscientists have never been able really to come togrips as to why that is so, and so on. and yet we humans take it asvery natural that we forget things from time to time. we lose information. we never go the other way. well, information and entropy,being the same concept--
although one's the negativeof the other, actually-- so that the natural law whichsays that entropy increases is the same as the human lawwhich says that the information that youknow decreases. it never increases withoutsome kind of interaction going on. we can take entropy andmove it around from one place to another. we can change its form fromchemical form to informational
form, if you like, ina variety of ways. and at the end of the day,it always increases. if you take a countof all the entropy everywhere in the universe. now, these two concepts havebeen developed separately and independently. claude shannon, who reallyinvented information theory in 1948, i believe understoodthat the formula for his concept of information, hisquantity, was identical to the
formula which was inuse in statistical mechanics for entropy. however, he never believed thatthey were really the same thing, and i don't think itoccurred to him to ask or answer the question whether onecould be traded for the other in a suitableexperiment. well, nowadays, with quantumcomputation going on and as electronic devices get smallerand smaller so you're controlling a larger number ofbits with fewer atoms, it
becomes important to track thetrading of information or entropy, of one form or another,when analyzing the operation of these devices. and it's not crucial yet, butbefore too many years are out, it's going to be crucial withdevices that you can make in standard manufacturingprocesses. interviewer: might there be anopportunity for this course to become part of the curriculum? penfield: i think the ideas fromthis course will become
part of the curriculum. i developed the course, and sethlloyd has been teaching it with me. he's a professor of mechanicalengineering. i developed the coursebecause i wanted the ideas to be tested. i wanted to make surethat they worked. i think the ideas willshow up in the curriculum in the future.
this course itself probablywill not. but there's another ambitionor dream that i have for this course. and that has to do with the factthat electrical engineers and engineers in general-- the concept of engineering andthe concept of science is not well understood by ournational leaders. most national leaders are notthe result of education in a place like mit, which isfocused on science and
engineering and basicallyprepares somebody for a vocation or employment as anengineer or scientist. they're the results of aliberal arts education. and by and large, the generaleducation that's given to people who become our nationalleaders does not have very much engineering in it, andnot very much science. so these people are calledupon to make national decisions of earth-shakingimportance, if you like, without having enoughbackground.
a course such as the one thatwe developed here, being taught to freshmen, could verywell form the foundation of a course which is offered toliberal arts graduates in a general university setting. it would not require heavymathematics, would not require a lot of prerequisites, andyet they could get the essential ideas. whatever they do with theirlife after that, they'd be better informed becauseof this.
interviewer: okay. so it's the importance of takingan engineering-type approach to making decisions,solving some of these challenges? penfield: well, the challengesthat are faced by our national leadership basically haveto do with satisfying, simultaneously, the needs ofseveral different demands placed on them. these people have to be ableto make judgments that are
based on a wide breadthof information. the trouble is that most people,i would say, don't have the sense of whatengineering is, or what science even is. and so they are apt to notbe able to make those judgments very well. and just a couple of coursescould help, one on a conserved quantity, like energy, and oneon a non-conserved quantity, like information.
and those two could providemetaphors which the people could use throughout theircareers in understanding what scientists are saying,understanding what non-scientists aremisunderstanding about what they're learning, etc. interviewer: so what are thechallenges with introducing those kinds of courses into aliberal arts curriculum at schools throughoutthe country? penfield: well, mit doesnot have a liberal arts
curriculum, so i'm really notmuch of an expert in this. i would like very much tosee some universities-- harvard is a perfect example ofa university that could do something like thisif they wanted to. so far they haven't seenexamples of it done, and i think our course may provide anexample they can look at. a course on a conservedquantity-- i'm not sure that there is anexample that i know of. probably there is, but i'mjust not aware of it.
i think the difficulty is thatit has to be done locally by somebody in the universitywho passionately cares about doing it. and i'm not that person. interviewer: right. but from what you've outlined,there could be opportunities up the street at harvard? penfield: there could. and if harvard didn't want todo it, there are probably
dozens of other placesthat could do it. interviewer: let's go backto the beginning. we were just talking about what you've been doing recently. i want to go back to thebeginning of your education. can you please tell me a littlebit about your family and growing up in birmingham,michigan? penfield: well, i wasyour typical geek at the time, or nerd.
those terms weren't used at thetime, but they certainly seem appropriate now. at the age of 10, i wasinterested in making crystal sets rather than playingbaseball. and i think many people at mitshare that same kind of a background. we were the consummate nerds. interviewer: were there othersin your family, or your parents, that instilledthis interest in you?
is this something that youjust did on your own? penfield: yeah, i justdid it on my own. interviewer: you werebuilding more than your typical heathkit. you were actuallybuilding pretty sophisticated heathkits. penfield: well, i did. the heathkit, as you know, wasa product line put out by the heath company of benton harbor,michigan, right after
world war ii. they got all this war surplusgear, and that's how they made their living for a while. but then they realized that theywere going to run out of this stuff, because the armyonly had bought so much that was surplus. and so they cast around for amarket, and they decided to make kits where they wouldsupply the electronic parts and complete instructions.
and their success dependedon having a good set of instructions which youcould easily follow. and you could make multimeters,you could make amplifiers, you could makeoscilloscopes, you could make all the kinds of test equipmentthat was pertinent at that time. and these were all vacuumtube-type things. transistors hadn't beeninvented at that time. but i made a bunch of them.
i was 10, 11 years old duringthe war, and i was making crystal sets at that time, alongwith a few friends who were geeks like me. interviewer: was there aparticular "ah ha" moment, growing up, when you realizedthat you had a special aptitude for doing this? penfield: i'm not surethat there was. i just always knew that i wasmore interested in this. and when i did playacting andthat sort of thing, i
playacted by setting up a radiostation studio, rather than by kicking a football. interviewer: was there aparticular teacher that inspired or motivated youto pursue this interest. penfield: i don't believe so. i don't believe so. i have no idea where it camefrom, but i was just interested in science. i listened to the radioand i thought
radio was kind of neat. there was no television atthat time, of course. interviewer: i also read youhad a keen interest in genealogy, and you can traceyour family back to 1651. and samuel penfield wasthe first penfield born in north america? penfield: well, to the bestof our understanding. interviewer: are you the personin your family most responsible for tracingyour family's roots?
penfield: no, i'm not. there are people who didthat well before me. and i happen to maintain thewebsite in which the penfield genealogy is available online. previously, it's been availablein book form. and of course, being availableonline means you can make corrections and additionsall the time. and i have fun doing that. interviewer: i recall listening,i think it was just
yesterday, to a keynote thatyou delivered at kresge auditorium as part of theeecs 100th anniversary. and in it, you cited a penfieldthat was responsible for some development ofsome early technology. was that penfielda descendant? penfield: that was a penfield. he isn't my ancestor. interviewer: yeah, ancestor,that's what i meant. ok.
it was not your ancestor. penfield: that wasnot one of mine. that was allen penfield, whoowned an iron mine in crown point, new york. and he purchased electromagnets from joseph henry. and joseph henry was thedominant scientist in the us during the 1830s he was locatedin albany, and he made electromagnets andhe did scientific
experiments with them. and it was very cumbersome to dosuch things, because there weren't batteries availableat that time. penfield bought a couple ofthese things and used them to magnetize spikes on a drum whichseparated iron from iron ore in his iron mine. and he got increased yieldbecause of the increased efficiency of the separationdue to the magnetism. and he kept these spikes in hisdrum magnetized by using
an electromagnet that hepurchased from henry. so that was said to be thefirst industrial use of electricity in the nation. and there is now a museum incrown point, new york. the penfield homestead has beenmade into a museum which celebrates that achievement. interviewer: so you clearly havea great interest in the history of technology. penfield: well, it's fun.
it's fun, and thereare fascinating stories from history. and i think i have anappreciation that history forms a context in which you canunderstand the present and the vector in which you aremoving toward the future. and without the knowledge of thehistory, you pretty much can't chart your own course. interviewer: certainly. certainly.
so let's talk about theevolution or the invention of the transistor, and how thatimpacted your life. penfield: i did not inventthe transistor. interviewer: you didnot invent it. but it certainly transformed orit was a keen interest of yours, even backas a young boy. penfield: well, i was 14 yearsold when it was invented in 1947 at bell laboratories. it was a celebratedachievement.
bell labs had been looking fora solid state device that could replace the vacuum tube,which was notoriously inefficient in its operation. it worked very well for somepurposes, but it was very inefficient in terms of power,and costly, and so on. and they were looking forsomething made out of solid material that could do it. and they knew that you couldmake rectifiers out of solid materials, the so-called pointcontact rectifier, the
cat's-whisker, and then thegalena samples that were used in crystal sets. as a kid, 10 years old, iwas making crystal sets. i knew how to do that. i knew how to wire upthe telephones. i wired our home telephone sothat i could have an extension in my room. and the telephone repairmancame around and fixed my mistakes and left me a note andtold me what i did wrong.
then a couple of years later,i used to hang out with the telephone repairmen in thecongregating place in the town where i lived. and they'd teach me thetechniques that they used and how they strung wire andall that sort of stuff. and i was just fascinatedby that. interviewer: i understand thatyou were a bit skeptical about the first generation oftransistors, due to i guess their fragility?
penfield: well, i was 14years old at the time-- 13, something like that. the transistor was announced,and i had spent time making crystal radios, and i knew howdifficult it was to find the exact sensitive spot on thecrystal where you could do it. and these people made atransistor by having two cat's-whiskers that were closeto each other, and both of them had to be in exactly theright location, not too far apart but not tooclose either.
and i just knew that thatwas too fragile to be commercially possible. furthermore, i confidently alot of my friends, my geeky friends who would care aboutsomething like that, that i was sure that this would notamount to anything since the devices had no filament, andeverybody knows that vacuum tubes had filaments. of course, that wasthe whole point. interviewer: so how would youdescribe william shockley's
contributions to transistortechnology? penfield: oh, well, hewas the father of all that kind of stuff. he headed up the whole group atbell labs that developed it in the first place. and he personally invented thejunction transistor, not the point-contact transistor,which was the early one. but three years later, he cameup with the theory of the junction transistor in aglorious paper in 1952.
he laid it all out and madeit actually believable. and bell labs startedmaking some of them. companies started makingsome of them. the first application oftransistors that were really reliable like that--and those were the first ones that were-- interviewer: reliable. that was the biggie. penfield: --reliableand manufacturable.
the first applicationswere to hearing aids. and raytheon, here inmassachusetts, was one of the companies which wanted toget into this business. and they made transistorsspecifically for hearing aids. now, most of the transistorsthen didn't work very well, and so they were the rejects. and so here they have maybe fiveor six transistors that work well that they could makehearing aids out of, and 50 or 100 transistors thatdidn't meet specs.
what are they goingto do with them? very cleverly, they relabeledthem and made them available to people who were hobbyists,who could then develop circuits of low quality, butnevertheless innovative circuits, making use of them. and they gave them away, orthey sold them very cheap. you could actually buytransistors very cheap. these were rejects from the-- interviewer: did you getaccess to any of those?
did you get one? penfield: anybodycould buy them. you could buy them at alliedradio company in new york, or lafayette. or allied was in chicago,i guess. lafayette was in new york. you could buy transistors fromthere, and if you understood how a vacuum tube worked andyou understood how a transistor worked, you couldactually make circuits.
interviewer: so when did youstart actually building things with transistors? penfield: in the early 1950s. it was fun. i had built some stuff withvacuum tubes before. i figured it would be funto try transistors. i burned out some by solderingthem too close to the body, and made all the usualmistakes that people made at that time.
but i actually got some circuitsto work, and i had a lot of fun doing that. interviewer: so how did, then,you decide to go to amherst for your undergrad education? penfield: i basically didn'tthink about it. i just followed advicethat was given to me. my grandmother thought that iought to go to mit, but she didn't know anything about it. my parents thought that i shouldprobably have a liberal
arts background, and so theypushed amherst as well as some other places. and i eventually got acceptedat some places, the same as happens today. and i made the choice on notvery good grounds, but i think it was a good choice anyway. interviewer: did you go toamherst with the intent of following-- at the time, there wasa 3-2 program at mit?
penfield: yes, i was. interviewer: can you talkabout that a little bit? penfield: yes. the so-called 3-2 program, whichexisted at that time, was between mit-- other technical universitiesmight have done it also, i'm not sure, but certainly mit did,in concert with half a dozen or more of the smallliberal arts colleges. and the idea is that you can gothree years to the liberal
arts college, then come to mit,go two years, and get two bachelor's degrees at the endof the five years, one from your first institution andthe second one from mit. amherst had that arrangementwith mit. williams did. a variety of other schoolsdid as well. and i thought it wasa wonderful idea. however, by the time the threeyears were up, i thought, i'm having so much fun here, i'mjust going to make it a 4-1
instead of a 3-2. it didn't work outquite that way. it was four, one and ahalf or four, two, or something like that. but it didn't matter, becausei got into mit. the reason i got in was that ihad been intending to come as a 3-2 person, so i wasnot unknown to mit. and that, i think, helpedmy admission. after i got here, i had toenroll as an undergraduate
because i lacked the engineeringbackground. i found it relatively easy,because my physics background and my math were fine. i got those at amherst, so i wasable to go fairly rapidly through the undergraduaterequirements. when i did that, and i satisfiedall the degree requirements, the said, oh,you don't need a degree. why don't you join thedoctoral program? so i did.
the rest is history. interviewer: that sounds likesuch an intriguing program, and one that would probablybe popular today. but i have to think that ifsomebody were to spend three years at a liberalarts college-- if that program existed today,and they were to spend three years somewhere else and comehere for two, it would seem, knowing what i know about thecurrent undergraduate curriculum, that it would bedifficult for those 3-2
students to get the same levelof technical education that a four-year mit undergraduatewould get. penfield: i don't think so. i don't think so. they can pick up the mathematicsand the basic sciences which are taughtat many different small undergraduate colleges. wellesley is an example of acollege which could do this very naturally.
they teach science very well,perhaps not engineering. and then they come to mit. i don't see any reason whyit couldn't work today. interviewer: what becameof the 3-2 program? penfield: it was abandoned. i don't think it wastoo popular. if it had been popular, theywould have figured out ways to make it continue, i'm sure. but i don't personally know.
i lost sight of it. interviewer: so, going backto amherst, how did your involvement in thecollege radio station add to your education? penfield: we did a lot ofactivities, of course. and i joined the radio stationbecause i was interested in audio and in electronicsand circuits and all and i was the only geek there,so i had full reign to do whatever i wanted to and nobodycould argue with me.
if i wanted to change themicrophones around, i could do that, and they would justgo along with it. and that worked out well. it gave me some practicalexperience. then it also gave me aninteresting project that turned into my firstpublication, as it turned out. one of the things that we wantedto do from time to time was a remote pickup. and a remote pickup--
if you're going to a differentcity, you call the telephone company and say, iwant a radio loop between here and there. and larry, you probably knowwhat a radio loop is. you attach your little remoteamplifier at the far end, and you have a direct loop back tothe station and they can put you on the air fromwherever you are. we did remote sports broadcaststhat way. we wanted to do somethingsimilar when there were events
on campus, either lectures orconcerts or recitals or sometimes just plain incidentsthat happened, bonfires and rallies and thatsort of thing. we wanted people to be ableto walk around and make broadcasts. previously, what we had done istake along a tape recorder, which at the time were ratherlarge and you had to strap it onto your back to carryit around, unlike today's tape recorders.
and then you had a microphoneand the reporter, the talent, would talk into themicrophone. and then you'd run back tothe station and play it. it wasn't done in real time. and we wanted to doit in real time. one of the things that we didwas wire up the campus. we climbed through allthe steam tunnels. we hacked into thelock systems. we made our own keys just theway mit people did at that
time, so that we could get intoall the buildings and not have to call the campuspatrol to let us in. and we ran wires from ourbuilding to all the other buildings on campus. then i decided whatwe needed was a portable remote amplifier. and the purpose of a remoteamplifier is to amplify a microphone signal upto a few volts to transmit back to the station.
if you try to transmit themicrophonic signal directly to the station over a set of wires,there's too much noise. it doesn't work. you have to amplify it first. that's true today as wellas it was 50 years ago. well, 50 years ago, theonly way of doing that was vacuum tubes. but hey, the transistor hadjust been invented. and this was the early 1950s andraytheon was making these
transistors, the ck721 and theck727, the ck722, depending on whether they were low-noise orregular-noise or more rugged, and so forth. they had this line of rejectsfrom their production of hearing aid transistors. and they were relativelycheap. so i designed this littleremote amplifier. and it was nice. the only thing is there weren'tany power transistors
at the time. so the only thing i could do isdo the preamplification-- i had to follow that bya tube which could put out enough power. so you have to have the batteryto run the tube and a little tiny battery to runthe four transistors that were in there. well, i could see where thiswas going, but i decided to build it with what i coulddo at the time.
and in the summer of-- i think it was 1953, i was athome and i just built up this little remote amplifier. as i recall, it had twomicrophone inputs, so the interviewer and the intervieweecould each have their own microphones. and then in the fall of 1953,i brought back to amherst to the radio station. and the engineer wouldstrap it on his back.
and it was fairly lightweight. it could be done. we'd run a pair of wires downto the nearest the point, using alligator clips to cliponto the radio loops that we'd put all over campus. and he could do a real-timebroadcast from anywhere on campus that we could runa pair of wires. and that was an innovation. it hadn't been done before.
interviewer: well, yes, it wasone of the first applications of transistor technology foraudio transmission, wasn't it? penfield: i believe it was. there were obviously a lot ofcompanies that were working on this, trying to do it. and the company having to doit, of course, had to make something which was rugged, wasmuch more reliable, and was able to be sold ata profit, and so on. interviewer: but meanwhile, asan undergraduate student at
amherst college who's buildingthis, and you're doing it at the same time companiesare developing this? penfield: that's right. interviewer: you're originatingthese remote broadcasts in amherst with stuffthat you put together yourselves? that's right. it's something that iput together myself. and i didn't have to have thequality of robustness that a
commercial product wouldhave to have. so i was able to do it without,necessarily, the intense engineering whichshould have been done at that time. interviewer: did others in theamherst student body-- were they aware that there was thiskind of cutting-edge application of this technologygoing on on campus? or did they just accept it? penfield: no, they said,"oh, that's neat.
now we can talk and not havethe delay getting the tape back." so they thoughtit was neat. and they figured out how tomake use of it in their and we had a student riot at onetime, as happens at many colleges of course. and i forget what theincident was. but here's the engineer outthere in the middle of it, trying to make sure that thewire which led back to the nearest building didn't gettrampled on, and the announcer
interviewing peopleright on the spot. and it was going onover the air as he was doing the interview. this was something that i don'tthink had been done before at amherst. it was a lot of fun. interviewer: and there was anarticle written about it. did you write the article? or was somebody elsedocumenting
that this took place? penfield: i wrote the article. i decided that this was aninteresting application. i hadn't seen any article aboutthis, and i didn't know anyone who'd done it. so i wrote it up andi sent it in to audio engineering magazine. next thing i knew, theypublished it. and i was surprised.
and they shortly thereaftersent me a check. they paid $28 a page. or was it $30? i'm not sure. and this occupied about threepages, and so i got a certain amount of money from this. and at that time, thatwas very welcome. interviewer: so thenthat led to-- because i know that you wenton to write quite a bit in
graduate school, which we'regoing to talk about, but what i want to do is toget you to mit. so how did you decide-- did you know already that youwere going to be going to mit after amherst? did you know before you wentto amherst that that was the next step? penfield: oh, yeah. i also applied to the universityof michigan because
i thought they had, and i knowthat they have, a good engineering school. and they still do. i would have been happyat the university of michigan also, i think. but mit was closer to amherst. university of michiganwas closer to home. mit accepted me and so i went. interviewer: so let's do goto, then, your prolific
writing career while a graduatestudent at mit. tell me about how allthat developed. penfield: i don't know thatit was prolific at all. but i did, after successfullywriting this article and getting paid for it, i thought,this is pretty neat. maybe i can do someother things. and i had some other ideas forprojects that i could do. while i was still at amherst,i developed beach phonograph amplifier.
and the way that worked is thatthere were these windup turntables for 78 rpm records. and the windup turntable usedto have an acoustic arm, and then the acoustic armwould play it. and there would beno electronics. so i substituted for that aregular crystal which was used in other audio gear at the time,but still the windup motor, and then later atransistor amplifier and speaker and that was neat.
it worked. and i took a photograph of acouple of my friends on the beach with it. and not only was the articlepublished but they used the picture on the coverof the magazine. so i got a little extramoney for that. then i did other projects. i made a headlight dimmer forautomobiles, which is based on a kind of optics with anastigmatic lens, and a
transistor so that you couldsee lights coming on the horizon but not comingtoo high or too low. and so it differentiated betweenstreetlights and oncoming traffic, and it wouldautomatically dim your lights when a car was coming. it worked, but i'm not sureit was practical. i wrote it up and published it,and got paid for it also. i made some other things, aguitar amplifier and various-- there were a lot of projects.
during a certain period of timefrom 1954 up until i got my doctorate, i wrote severalarticles about transistors, some of them about construction projects which i had done. i loved to do the constructionprojects, design them and carry them out and photographthem and document them and sell the articles. and some of them were how-toarticles about care of transistors.
some of them were the theorybehind transistors. it turns out that transistorshad just come into the public view. not many people who werehobbyists in electronics knew about transistors. and i did becausei studied them. it was a fortunate coincidencethat i was the right person at the right time, if you like. and i knew that.
so i would sit downwhile i was a graduate student at mit-- as an undergraduateand graduate student, as i explained. i had one and a half yearsas an undergraduate. during that five-year periodthat i was at mit before i got my doctorate degree, i actuallysat down in the evenings and on weekends andi'd grind out one article after another after another.
and i could do them fairlyprolifically. interviewer: well, that'swhy i used the word. because you did. you had quite a bit of-- in fact, i read where theincome from some of this writing actually one semesterpaid your tuition. tuition wasn't very much then. it was only $500 a semester. but rather than have anassistantship, i figured i
could make more money writing. and i think maybe i did. my wife had a job, so i didn'tneed to worry about eating. and i simply wrote one articleafter another after another and made enough topay the tuition. i joke and say that i put myselfthrough graduate school writing articles. now that's a stretch, to besure, but it actually happened one semester.
interviewer: so tell me aboutyour first impressions of mit, particularly compared to yourexperiences at amherst. penfield: my first impressionsof mit were that this was a really geeky place. at amherst, i'd been the onlygeek in town, in a certain manner of speaking. but here, everywhere i went,there was another one like me. and it was great tosee these people. interviewer: you feltyou belonged,
right from the get-go. penfield: yeah. well, i felt i belongedat amherst, also. i never had a senseof not belonging. but i knew i was different frommost of the people there, who have gone on to very fineand illustrious careers, but they weren't interestedin engineering. and i was. interviewer: so you musthave had so many great
relationships with faculty as agraduate student, given the fact that you were so eager totest things, try new things, roll up your sleeves,build things. what what was the graduateyears like? penfield: well, it was a lotof fun being a graduate student here. i guess three or three and ahalf of those years i was actually a graduate student. in the first year and a half iwas still doing undergraduate.
so as an undergraduate i hadgreat fun understanding how the physics that i had learnedactually applied. you could do quantitativethings with it. you could actually solve forfield configurations. i knew that fields existed,but i haven't known how to actually calculate themin any sense. i didn't have any judgmentabout what they were. this is the difference betweenscience and engineering. and i picked that up.
that was fun. then, watching the engineeringfaculty and the fun that they had-- interviewer: what were some ofthe more interesting faculty that you worked with? penfield: well, i didn't workwith doc edgerton, but of course everybody knew him. and he was a lot of fun. we had annual steakfrys in course 6.
and he would come down withhis guitar and play. and i used to play guitar, andhe was much better than i was, but he invited me upanyway, and we made fools of ourselves. and we had a lot of fun. i worked with hermannhaus on my thesis. and the way that that turned outis that i was in charge of the rotating machinelab one year. rotating machines were on theway out as far as the
education here goes. and i sort of knew that. westinghouse had made what wascalled the generalized machine, and they had modeledcertain parts of it, but we didn't have a model whichwas inclusive. and i suddenly realized thatthis was true, and i looked around, and i didn't seeanyone else doing it. so i went home one night anddeveloped the general model, all the equations necessaryfor the general model.
it was too complicatedto use for very much, but there it was. and i made it availableto all the others. i was put in charge of that, andthen i was also interested in the ieee, the institute-- well, it was the institute ofradio engineers at that time. they put on a series of lecturesby eminent people. and one of the people gave atalk about masers, which had just come out.
these were the predecessors tolasers, which are so common today, but at a lowerfrequency. and they mentioned someconservation laws that had been developed for masers. they were known as the so-called manley-rowe equations. and i looked at them and ifigured, gee, they also ought to apply to rotating machines,not just to the kind of devices that were used thatthese physicists.
and so i figured out, well, gee,maybe i can make some of the circuits that they hadmade, but on a much lower frequency scale-- not for any practical purpose,but just to see whether they'd work. one day i was in charge ofthe laboratory using this generalized machine, andall the students were doing their stuff. and i had nothing to do, soi grabbed one of the other
students, and the two of ustogether sat down and i explained what i wanted to do. and then he said, yeah, i thinkthis ought to work. we sat down, took an hour,and got it to work. that other student turned out tohave an illustrious career. that was al oppenheim of ourdepartment, who had quite a career here at mit and isstill on the faculty. he used to say later that hewrote his first technical paper with me when the twoof us wrote that up as a
technical paper. interviewer: i would imagine,given your skills at both writing and building things andexperimenting, that you were on a fairly fasttenure track. penfield: i think so. i got the doctorate three and ahalf years after becoming a graduate student. interviewer: and then how longafter that did you become tenured faculty?
penfield: i just rosethrough the ranks. at that time, the department wasexpanding, in part because the ford foundation was introuble with the irs. they had to give away a lot oftheir money or they were in jeopardy of losing theirtax exempt status. so they gave a lot of it tomit and established ford postdoctoral fellowshipsthat were available to hire new faculty. well, i was one of those.
many of those people were toldexplicitly, you have a one-year, or two-year, orthree-year, as the case may be, appointment and that's it. and i heard them grumbling amongthemselves, and then i realized, i hadn'tbeen told that. i was one of these also, butnobody had told me that. and i started to worry thatmaybe they weren't telling me something, but the fact isthey weren't telling me something for a good reason.
and i stayed and the others didhave only temporary ones. but i joined the faculty androse through the ranks at the normal rate. interviewer: so i want to talka little bit about change. you came to mit in 1955,over 55 years ago. i'd like to explore some of thechanges and transitions you've experiencedduring that time. so let's start withtechnology. and you're talking to a fairlynon-technical person here.
penfield: i'm not talkingto you anyway. i'm talking to the audiencewho's out there in never-never land. interviewer: exactly. exactly. but you have stated that manyof the developments in your field at mit since 1950 have todo with semiconductors in one form or another, becausethat technology became so pervasive and dominant.
penfield: that is true. interviewer: first astransistors, then as integrated circuits, then asvlsi, and now as system integration. can you talk about the impact ofthese developments, and in particular, the practicalapplications of these technologies? penfield: well, i think thepractical applications of these technologies has been totake over all the electronics
and the information handling. and i think it's prettywell-known and pretty well-accepted that all of thestuff that you buy nowadays, the electronic gear that youbuy, is all based on and there are more transistorsin a car today than were ever manufactured before 1960,every single car. airplanes nowadays are nothingmore than crates that carry around 50 millionlines of code on computers that run them.
everything that's made todayrelies on transistors, and on semiconductors. and the way in which thathappened, though, did involve a transition between whatis now known as analog electronics and digitalelectronics. and this actually took place-- there were the precursors ofthis in the late 1950s, even. there were some precursorsto this. but it happened in earnest afterthe development of the
integrated circuit in 1960,where you could stuff more and more transistors on a veryreliable surface and have them permanently connected together,and not have to worry about wiring them up andsoldering them and all this kind of stuff. and the digital abstractionand the encoding of normal information into digitalform really took off during the 1960s. and it became a dominant newform for electronic engineers,
who up to that time had not hadto worry about computers. they'd never seen a computerof course by that time. and they didn't knowanything about it. but suddenly they're confrontedwith having to work with digital signals ratherthan what are now known as analog signals. and they had to relearn alot of what they know. so that transition whichhappened in electronics actually was very significantto our department, because
that helped inform a lot of thedevelopments that went on in the our department atthat period of time. interviewer: so you came hereas a 22-year-old student. what aspects of the mit cultureand the mit student body have remained constantduring that time? and what are the mostsignificant changes that you have witnessed duringthat time? penfield: well, certainly thefact that mit appeals to geeks was true then, although the wordwasn't used at that time,
and it's true today, and isuppose it will be true into the future, no questionabout it. what you're a geek abouthas changed. one thing that has changedi feel is an unfortunate development, that it's notpossible for people with my kind of experience, my kind ofhacking experience, to come here anymore. now let me explain whati mean by that. when i was 10 years old, i wasmaking crystal sets, as my
fellow geeks all over thecountry were at that time. in what is now called middleschool, i learned about the transistor and i started makingtransistor circuits as audio amplifiers and so on. and we've gone throughsome of that. nowadays, there's nochallenge to that. people can make crystal radiosbut it's just not the same. you don't have thesame thrill. when i was young, i took apartan automobile engine.
i learned how to use hand toolsin doing that, and i really screwed it up and lostthe car, but i only lost $75 so it didn't matterall that much. nowadays, if you look underneaththe hood of your car, you'll understand whynobody can ever service their own car anymore. it's just now all specialized. and if you take apart anyelectronic gear, you'll find that it's all encasedintegrated circuits.
you can't really do the kindof things which give you a hands-on experience, atleast in most domains. nowadays, the hands-onexperience that students have when they come in ismore of a keyboard. and so it's one step removedfrom reality. and that's unfortunate, becauseif you're going to teach people concepts as we wantto at mit, the best way of doing it is tohave them have concrete examples of that.
and then you teach theabstractions which tie together all the variousconcrete examples that you had. and then you can remember theabstractions and work with them in the future. interviewer: but you've justpointed out though-- but where are the opportunitiesto do that? do we have to manufacturethem? penfield: i don't knowthe answer to this.
some of it can be deliberatekits that you can still buy today, kits from which you canmake audio amplifiers or individual transistors or even cat's-whisker-based crystal sets. you can buy those. it's just not the dominant way,and people don't get a thrill out of it asmuch as they did. i don't know theanswer to that. it might be in a higherlevel of abstraction
before we even get here. it might be in the biologicalareas rather than in the electrical areas. i just don't know how that'sgoing to develop. interviewer: paul, you haveserved mit in a number of you were associate eecsdepartment head from 1974 to 1978. you were director of themicrosystems research center from 1985 to 1989, and eecsdepartment head from 1989
through 1999. what attracted you tothese positions? penfield: well, being associatedepartment head, i had the ability and the optionof finding out more of what was going on. i always had a natural curiosityabout what various people in the departmentwere doing. and so i'd quiz them on, hey,what are you up to, and that sort of thing.
i thought that as associatedepartment head-- and bill davenport was thedepartment head who asked me to be the associate-- i would have the ability to getto know even more of what i've always had the idea thatyou should have as much breadth as possible in yourtechnical knowledge. you should not become too muchof a specialized person. you should be moreof a generalist, technologically speaking.
this is in distinction to mostpeople who get their greatest success by being more and morespecialized, knowing more and more about less and less. and i decided i wanted to knowa little bit about a lot of things, and that distinguishedme from some of the others. i should say, i also knew thatthere was within the department-- at that time in 1974-- an issue that was of overridingimportance.
and that was the issue ofwhether we were going to stay together as one departmentor split into two. the two departments would havebeen one focused on computer science and the digital sideof things, and one focus on electrical engineering or thenondigital, the continuous or analog side of things. and i felt, from knowing what idid about the development of electronics, that it would be amistake to split, but there were perfectly rationalpeople with arguments
on the other side. and i felt that as associatedepartment head, i could have a say and have an influencein that decision. interviewer: paul, going backto the theme of change, can you talk a bit about theremarkable changes that have taken place in the electricalengineering department, including adding the cs, orcomputer science, to the department's name. we had always been thedepartment that was inclusive,
in the sense that we wouldn'tlet any specialty get away. now, electrical engineeringin general is like that. our professional society wasthe ire and the aiee. one was power-related, onewas electronics-related. the two finally realized thatthat was not a winning strategy, so they ultimatelygot together in 1962. we, as a department, haddeveloped expertise in the digital side of things, digital electronics, during the 1960s.
and that was fine. other universities had also donethat and then concluded that the best thing they shoulddo is allow these digital people to have their owndepartment, so they could set their own destiny and havetheir own developments and be unfettered by being tied toordinary engineering. that issue came up here at mitbecause some of the people felt that there wasn't adequateleadership in the department who were ableto understand the
digital side of things. lou smullin, when he wasdepartment head, made the decision to appoint twoassociate department heads, one that came from the computerscience side of things and one fromthe ee side. these two faculty are stillwith us on the faculty. one was bob fano from computerscience, and the other is millie dresselhaus fromelectrical engineering. he did that because he didn'tfeel capable of providing
leadership over such a broadrange of topics. well, this naturally led to thequestion, is it ever going to be possible to provide thatkind of leadership, or should we split into two departments? and there were rationalarguments on both sides. the people who viewed computerscience as a branch of engineering felt that theyshould stay together. those who viewed it as a branchof mathematics felt that they would be betteroff separate.
that's a simple-mindedview, but not too far from the truth. the winning argument at thetime, which i was one of the people who helped make, and iwas proud of my contribution to that, was that pretty soonyou wouldn't be able to tell the two apart, becauseelectronics was moving in the direction of being moreand more digital. and computer science was moreand more interested in finding interesting ways to implementtheir ideas in novel circuits.
so i and several others foresawthat what would happen is that these two disciplines,if you like to think of them as two disciplines, would notgrow wider and wider apart in the future, but would stay moreor less parallel, each with their own specialtyto be sure. but it would be like one granddiscipline with two branches, rather than two separatedisciplines which should go apart. and it was very important thatthe department structure and
hierarchy should reflect this,because otherwise it would be a costly mistake to make. if the two branches were goingto go and diverge from each other, then staying togetherwould just not be appropriate. on the other hand, if theystayed together and we were two departments-- that happened at berkeley, forexample, they were two departments-- then after awhile they wouldfeel the urge, they would
recognize that something waswrong, and they'd have to get together again, which berkeleydid to their credit. but they've always, to thisday, remained more of a separate two organizationsthan was true at mit. so this debate took place inthe, i believe, early '70s. what we did at that time wasput in a curriculum which would favor computer science. so we did establisha curriculum-- this was in about the1974 time frame--
that was devoted to computerscience, and a curriculum in and this was as far as wedared to go in a split. after that discussion, whichwas led by several people including joel moses, mikedertouzos, and many other department leaders, it wasdecided by the faculty. i'm not aware that a formal votewas taken, but there was certainly a consensus that wasobtained that we should stay together as one department. and joel moses, very cleverly,decided what the name of the
new department should be, andthen asked the question in a way in which that was theonly possible choice. he was good at that sort ofthing and i admire him for it. he said, should it be thedepartment of electrical engineering and computer scienceor the department of computer science and electricalengineering. and the department actually, ibelieve, did vote on this, give an expression of opinion. we changed the name at that timeto give more prominence
to the computer scienceaspect. and i don't think we've everregretted, since that time, that decision. and i feel, looking back, thatthat's the most important decision this departmenthas ever taken at mit. and it was effected in 1974. and bill davenport then becamedepartment head and he asked me to be associatedepartment head. and i felt that i couldhelp implement this.
now, i was one of the few peoplewho had background in both the digital and theanalog side of things. so i was able tosee both sides. interviewer: and so-- but the debate presented itselfagain some years later. did this whole question getreopened, where there was a faction that stillwanted to split? penfield: no. the decision was made.
nobody ever broughtthat up again. the question was how toimplement that decision in terms of curriculumand so forth. if we are going to staytogether, and if we believe that the two disciplines arereally one discipline, why shouldn't we have similarcurricula? well, i was placed in chargeof a committee to establish what became the common corecurriculum in the department. and i got a lot of people thati respected a lot on it, and
we developed four courses thatcovered-- two from computer science and two from electricalengineering-- that every undergraduate hadto take, no exceptions. and then from then on, youcould specialize more. that worked for many,many years. interviewer: then youwent on to become-- and i do want to jump to whenyou were department head. because that was a significantperiod of growth as well, particularly growth in thepopularity of the major.
and you had to deal with all ofthat as department had in terms of resources, interms of demand. what would you say were someof the most significant challenges associated withleading that department, particularly the largestdepartment at mit? penfield: well, i think themost the most important challenge that i had-- and this was true when i wasassociate department head. it was also true in the 1980swhen i undertook the
development of the vlsi program,and was my most important challenge inthe 1990s when i was department head. it was to make sure that therewas a good ambiance and a good feeling of trust and respectbetween the electrical engineering and the computerscience side of things, so that nobody would ever bringup whether we should break apart for the wrong reasons. in other words, if you don'tlike the person in the
department that you have to dealwith, well, then, there's an issue and you use somepretext to break it apart. i didn't want that to happen,and i felt that people from all disciplines had tounderstand their counterparts. well, in the 1980s, when i wasrunning the vlsi program, there was a lot of researchopportunity to take people with expertise on one side orthe other and make them work-- and induce them, not make themwork, but induce them to have research which touched on bothsides, and to supervise
students from both sides. and this got them to like eachother and like their abilities a lot, and to have respect. and i also did a lot of thatduring the 1990s when i was department head. interviewer: the whole is muchgreater than the sum of its parts, in this case. all the interesting research ata university takes place in the cracks between theboundaries, between one
department and other. i wanted to make sure thatthere was no crack that developed between ee and cs,where a lot of interesting research should go on. and that certainly has beena major concern of the department, to beable to do that. and that goes on to this day. interviewer: and so it soundslike that partially answers this next question, but whataccomplishments are
you most proud of? penfield: i would list theaccomplishments that i'm most proud of-- probably the first one, mycontribution to making the decision to keep the departmentunited rather than split in two. and i've alreadydescribed that. second, bringing back to campusresearch in vlsi and integrated circuits, and my rolein the establishment of a
fabrication facility whichtoday serves not only integrated circuit research butalso more general research into small devices andsmall systems. and we foresaw that in the1980s, that having a facility like that on campus would enableresearch which had never been done here at mitbefore, and that this was a game we had to be in. and b: i was involved in thefundraising for that. i was involved in theadministration of the
research, and i made surethat the research was cross-disciplinary innature to enforce my feelings about that. that would be the second,perhaps, major-- the third major contribution,which i do feel quite good about, is the edgerton center. doc edgerton, a belovedprofessor and hands-on guy, died in 1990. within six months of my beingdepartment head, i was
suddenly faced with whatto do with his legacy. and his legacy consists ofspace, it consists of a lot of goodwill, it consisted of a lotof artifacts and so forth. and it took me a couple ofyears, but i worked together with kim vandiver to establishthe edgerton center with pretty clear guidelines. kim was about to becomethe chair of the faculty at that time. and i talked to kim at length,over and over and over again.
and i could see that he reallywould like to see something happen that was appropriate. and he had such good ideas aboutwhat to do with doc's legacy, and i had the space,so i could contribute something important to that. he had that personal experienceof having worked with doc, an experiencewhich i did not have. and furthermore, he had a goodsense of what something like that could do for mit and forthe nation, in providing an
opportunity that we don'totherwise have to provide hands-on experience to studentswho, as we discussed a few minutes ago, today arriveat mit without having had any hands-on experience. he hemmed and he hawed becausehe knew he was slated to become chair of the facultyduring the early 1990s. finally, he said he saw his wayclear to serving that and then taking over theedgerton legacy. so we established theedgerton center.
we ran it for a long periodof time within the eecs department. finally, they got enoughstability to become an independent entity, and i'mvery, very pleased with how kim has handled the edgertoncenter ever since. and he's attracted outstandingpeople. amy smith certainly is one ofthem, ed moriarty is another. there are a whole bunch of verygood people who have a mission of outreach and ofproviding hands-on experience
to people before they cometo mit and after they come to mit. and they certainly do a servicefor the community and for the nation that'sjust wonderful. interviewer: so was the fourthfloor of building 4-- was that space part of the eecsspace portfolio? penfield: yes, it was. interviewer: it was. penfield: but it no longeris, of course.
now it's the edgerton center. and i'm very pleased withhow that has turned out. and i played some little role inthe establishment of that. interviewer: it's still veryvibrant, particularly during the summer. you walk down that corridor,students from all over, young people-- that's a great legacy. penfield: yes, it is.
another thing that i was verypleased to have been able to do during my stay as departmenthead had to do with the development of anundergraduate curriculum. and the best way of looking atthat is to ask the question, what is it that engineersare apt to do after their education. mit provides a vocationaleducation. that is, this is not ageneral education. this is not liberal arts.
we provide vocational education,and the assumption is that our graduates want acareer acting as an engineer, in practice. and ever since the departmentwas founded in 1902, that's been the dominant undergraduatemission of the and that was very nicelyarticulated by dugald jackson, who was one of our long-termdepartment heads, who arrived here in 1907. and he wrote, shortly beforecoming here from wisconsin,
that he respected technicians,but he knew that technicians were not same as engineers. technicians apply technology tosolve practical problems, and scientists developscience. but what engineers did wasin between the two. engineers would apply knowntechnology to solve problems but also invent newtechnology as necessary, using known science. and scientists provided thescience, engineers converted
that when necessary to newtechnology or new techniques, and technicians could then applyit as well as engineers. and this worked very well untilthe second world war. and in the 1940s, in the worldwar ii, the radiation lab here at mit proved that that didn'tquite work the way jackson intended, because inthe development of practical radar-- radar was invented in england,but it was made practical here in the us in a developmentphase.
it turned out that the peoplewho made the outstanding contributions were scientists,not engineers. engineers played a supportingrole, an important one to be sure, but a supporting role. scientists played the moreinnovative roles. and they were used to thinkingoutside the box more than engineers were, and developingnew science. gordon brown among others-- and he became department headand he was able to put this
into effect-- he realized that engineersshould be able to develop new science as necessary. at least some engineers-- not all, to be sure-- but someengineers should be educated so that they could provide newscience, as necessary, for engineering applications. because scientists wouldn'tdo it the right way. they weren't motivatedby the--
that isn't to say thatscientists are not competent or anything like that, butthey are motivated by different things. they aren't motivatedby the applications. so what became known asengineering science was the development of new understandingof physical nature and the laws of sciencein a form that can be used better by engineers. interviewer: so you wereinstrumental in introducing
that into the undergraduatecurriculum? penfield: not me. this was gordon brown,starting in-- and in order to do that, he hadto basically supplement the bs degree, the sb degreewhich we were giving for practice of engineering,with a very strong doctoral program. so now we had two degrees. we have the sb degree for peoplewho wanted to practice
engineering, and we have the phdfor people who wanted to teach or do research intoengineering science. and there are those twoactivities that engineers could do. that worked fine for awhile, until computer science came along. and electrical engineers had toknow too much stuff, and we basically got overloaded, andit was either a matter of cutting down on the breadth thatwe taught our students,
or cutting down on thedepth, or some combination of the two. and we had two curricula, andthat was a way of cutting down on the breadth. we tried this formula of havingthe common core, which i talked about a few momentsago-- two courses from ee and two from computer science-- followed by more specialtycourses. and that held the difficultiesfor awhile.
but still, the solution tothis, oddly enough, was provided not by us educators. it was provided byour students. our graduates decided, or theiremployers decided, that if they were going to besuccessful as practicing engineers, they had to have boththe breadth necessary to understand the new technologiesthat were coming along, especially digitaltechnologies, and the depth necessary to understand themand apply them properly.
you could not get bywithout either. so what happened? our students, after graduation,all went for master's degrees. well, not all, but alarge number did. and their employers likedthat, and the employers paid the bills. interviewer: wherewere they getting these master's degrees?
penfield: from mit, but oftenfrom other places. stanford had an outstandingprogram of providing master's degrees of high qualityin various areas. a lot of universities did. so there was a realdemand for it. and in that sense, our students,by walking with their feet, showed us whatwe ought to do next. they said, if i'm going to bea successful electrical engineer in practice, orcomputer scientist, or
whatever you want to call me, ihave to have breadth, and i also have to have depth. and if it takes five yearsto do it, i'm going to do it that way. and the companies thathired them agreed. and so, upon recognizing that,we figured, why shouldn't we make this more efficientfor the students? and so several people at mitin our department started thinking about ways of makingit more efficient.
and bill siebert wasparticularly instrumental in articulating the ideas. when i became department head,i decided that this was something that we couldactually do. so i put together astudy group and-- how are we going to actuallyimplement this? and there were a lot of detailsto cover, of course, in something like this. but we changed the philosophy ofour department from having
our flagship program be thebachelor's program, which it had been, to being themaster's program. we introduced the masterof engineering program in 1994 and made-- we actually rewrote the mitcatalog so that it comes first before the bachelor's program. the master's is ourflagship program. the bachelor's is stillavailable, for those who want it, and there are a variety ofgood purposes that it serves.
but we figured the master'sis what people need. it's been outstandingly popular,successful, most of our students want it. at the same time, we introduceda new undergraduate program which was a combinationof ee and cs, didn't specialize toomuch in either one but gave more breadth. that is overwhelminglypopular. over half of our students signedup for it rather--
interviewer: as opposedto the meng program? penfield: no, that's partof the meng program. the meng program requires youto have all the requirements for a bachelor's degree,plus the meng experience of one year. it's a five-year program, andyou get both degrees at the end of that, is thetypical schedule. but the undergraduatespecializations that you would have are either electricalengineering-centered or
computer science-centered, orthe combination program with more breadth. and its outstanding success isthat combination program, which well over half of ourstudents sign up for. interviewer: that's whati was going to say. you would imagine that there'sa lot of incentive, or certainly interest, in gettingthe meng degree, if it's only one more year thenjust a regular eecs bachelor's degree.
the advantage to the meng degreeprogram is that, first of all, students who are in goodstanding with good grades can be basically guaranteeda position. they don't have to go througha lot of hassle about application. secondly, they can postpone tothe fifth year some of their bachelor degree requirements, ifthey wish, and postpone and optimize the last two yearsof their curriculum. and a lot of students do that.
some students want to attendgraduation with their class, and so they make sure they getthe undergraduate requirements out of the way. but many do not. they have that flexibility. and it's basically moreefficient and it provides more incentive to our students. it's been a very successfulprogram which has now been maybe not completely adopted,but variations of it have
begun to appear in otheruniversities as well. interviewer: and a lastingcontribution to the electrical engineering and computerscience department. penfield: yes, and that'ssomething i feel very proud about, having had a role to playin that during my years as department head. interviewer: let's just shiftgears a little bit, and talk about research. now, i know your technicalinterests have included
solid-state microwave devicesand circuits, noise and thermodynamics, electrodynamicsof moving media, circuit theory,computer-aided design, apl language extensions, integratedcircuit design automation, and computer-aidedfabrication of integrated circuits. now, time doesn't allow us,obviously, to go through and talk about each one of them. but if you could talk about, inmore general terms, in your
research and field of study,what would you consider to be the more interestingdiscoveries? penfield: the more interestingdiscoveries i think are the ones that simplify ourbasic understanding. now, if you notice-- the list that you read, youobviously got it off my website, because i wrote it. interviewer: a good placeto get information. that is a wide-ranging list.
you find very few faculty atmajor universities who jump around like that. the reason i did is that i havethe philosophy, in doing research, that "have tool, willtravel." what i want to do is i want to use some toolsin one area, and when i get tired of that, i want to beable to take the tools and move over to another area. if i find some similarities wheni get there, well, then i can go back and see what workedin one area and apply
it to the other. it's a very fruitful strategy. and it's one which allowed me tobe inquisitive all my life. people who specialize and knowmore and more about a narrow specialty certainly can havevery satisfying careers, no question about it. i think that my particularnature was that i was more curious about learning aboutthings i didn't know anything about, like informationtheory recently.
the idea of unifying conceptsfrom different areas-- i mentioned earlier the conceptthat entropy from thermodynamics and informationfrom information theory and communications are the sameconcept, and that you can actually build devices whichconvert from one to another. this is neat, because if you'regoing to teach this to students, you only need toteach it once rather than second, or at least you teachit once, and then when they really learn the details of onearea, they'll think back
to when they first heard aboutit and say, oh, yes, that's the same as i heard back then. so there's an efficiency forthe students that makes it easier to transmit the body ofknowledge from one generation to another. i think these are veryimportant concerns. interviewer: this leads to mynext question about mit's particular approach to research,and particularly mit's approach tointerdisciplinary research.
can you talk a littlebit about that? penfield: i'm probably not yourbest expert on that, but the interdisciplinary researchthat we do-- we're noted for that. rle, being one of the firstinterdisciplinary, interdepartmental or howeveryou want to term that, research labs in the country,came right out of the radiation lab. i mentioned the experience ofthe radiation lab earlier, in
developing radar. interviewer: scientistsand engineers? found that scientists madecontributions and engineers did not. maybe they could have, butthey didn't at the time. and rle has been very successfulin unifying, basically, physicists andelectrical engineers, but now other kinds of engineeringand scientific disciplines as well.
other interdisciplinaryactivities i think have been good. you could regard eecs, asa department, being interdisciplinary inthe two branches. and in the future i think thiswill lead to possibly three branches, one in appliedbiology, informational biology especially, and the use ofbiological systems in making practical devices. i think there's a bright futurethere which we are
embarking on. there are eecs faculty that arecurrently occupying labs over in the koch center forintegrative cancer research. yes, that's right. we're, i think, doinga good job. this is nothing that i did, buti do take a certain amount of pride in having establishedwithin, or continued within, the department the philosophythat permits something like this.
and i think we'll see, maybe20 years from now when the biological revolution has playedits way, the next one on the horizon seems to bequantum engineering. i think we'll find quantummechanics playing an important role in engineeredsystems that it doesn't play right now. i think we'll see that themanufacture of quantum devices, whatever they may becalled upon to do, will be very important.
and i'd like to see ourdepartment of electrical engineering and computer sciencelead that at mit as i think it's capable of doing. and this will be, maybe,a fourth branch of the interviewer: we talked earlierabout transition. there's another transitioni want to talk about. and that is a significant oneat mit that i know that you didn't have a lot to do with,but that was the opening of the stata center in 2005.
prior to that, in order for thestata center to be built, building 20 had to bedemolished, much to the chagrin of a largecadre of loyal and passionate occupants. i know that you spent some ofyour early years at mit in building 20. what was it about building 20that was so appealing to the folks that occupiedoffices and labs along its creaky corridors?
penfield: the simplest way ofexplaining this is to say that, if you're running a laband you need to run a wire from one room to another, youdon't call the electrician. you take a screwdriver, you pokea hole in the wall, you thread the wire over,and you're done. it was a temporary building, andbecause it was temporary, nobody cared whether you pokeda hole in the wall or not. that's a metaphor, not onlyfor actual wiring-- i mean, people actually didthat, to poke holes in the
walls and to run wires-- but it's also a metaphor for thekind of interactions that you can get in a temporaryspace by having in juxtaposition people working ondifferent things, that bump into each other in the corridor,who have to deal with each other when it gets toohot or too cold to turn on the radiator, and by theway what are you doing, and so forth. the fact is that a lot of verygood science and engineering
work got done in that structuresimply because everybody knew that it wouldn'tbe around forever and you didn't have to paya lot of attention to the structure itself. so you can pay attention to thework that you're doing and the people who are doing it,and if you get ideas from other people. and it sort of broughtout the best in everybody who was in there.
i had an office for severalyears in that space. interviewer: yeah. i mean i would havethought that-- during my career at mit, i'dheard several times that building 20 was goingto be demolished. and then there would be someresistance and then another five years would pass. it seemed to havequite a certain amount of staying power.
penfield: well, it had stayingpower because nobody had the money necessary to replace it. and finally, it was recognizedthat there was a need to move back onto campus the computerscience wing of our and this was an issue thathad bothered our department for a long time. the physical separation betweenthose folks interested in the bit-oriented side ofelectrical engineering and those interested in the atomicside of electrical
engineering, if you want todistinguish it that way-- it's harder to form liaisons andcollaborations with that physical separation. so finally it came to thebreaking point, i think. we have to move these peopleback on campus. the only place to move wasbuilding 20, so regrettably, we have to tear downbuilding 20. we managed to get a wonderfuldesign done by frank gehry and associates for the statacenter itself.
interviewer: going back tobuilding 20, you organized events commemoratingbuilding 20. as you termed it earlier, yousaid that you organized a wake for building 20, for which youreceived the 1999 presidential citation for the association ofalumni and alumnae at mit. tell me a little bit about yourwake for building 20. penfield: basically,we knew building 20 would be coming down. it had already been strippedin the sense
that most of the offices-- people had moved out, andthe laboratories-- people had taken their equipmentand so forth. so there was a lot of emptyrooms, but no actual demolition had yet occurred. and it occurred to me, and tosome others, that building 20 engendered love from peoplein a way that most buildings would not. and people had fondmemories of that.
perhaps the outstanding examplewas the tech model railroad club, which was basedin building 20 and which did some of the early digitalengineering here at mit. that's a wonderful example. but many people from manydifferent departments were involved in building 20, hadoffices or labs there. and it was decided that weshould give those people a chance to grieve the lossof the building. and so we actuallyorganized it.
they came around. and on the day of the event,one of the famous mit hacks was a big replica of theproperty office sign that-- what'd it say? interviewer: deactivationsticker. penfield: yeah, it was adeactivation sticker that you put on old furnitureand old equipment. so they had a huge onewhich they hung from one of the windows.
and that showed that thehacking community was with us, also. but there were wonderfulstories told during that event. and on more than one occasion,somebody would be speaking of an incident that had happened,and i don't know how it happened but suddenly the wirecame from here to there, or and then somebody would pipe upfrom the audience, yeah, i was involved in that.
just in the middleof sessions. interviewer: that can beseen online in fact. penfield: yes, yes, it can. interviewer: it was calledthe magical incubator. that was the term thatwe had for it. we got a committee of alumniwho had been on-- ted saad was on thatcommittee. there were several people frommit who were on the committee, who planned and organized thewhole thing and did a very
effective job, i think. and the people who came to itloved it, and it allowed them to get along without theirbeloved partner. so it really did serve thesame purpose as a wake. interviewer: andthere's still-- what's nice is that in theentrance to, i think, the dreyfus tower, there's acommemorative display for building 20 over inthe stata center. penfield: yes, the mit museumdid an excellent job of
putting that together. i was very pleased. there is also a time capsule. there are two time capsulesin the stata center. one is about building 20, and itis in the building 20 area the mit museum put together. then there's another timecapsule having to do with the computer science wingof the department. interviewer: you also served theinstitute in the mid-'90s
as the chair of the ad hoccommittee on education via advanced technologies, whichissued its final report in july of 1995. interviewer: what was thatexperience like? and in your opinion, did thatreport serve as a potential foundation for theopencourseware initiative? penfield: well, that was a funexperience, because the web had just, basically-- the graphical browser ofthe web, netscape,
had just come out. and with the graphical browser,suddenly everybody's eyes were open about whatthe web could do. and people were buildingweb pages and so on. then the question is, how canthis influence our education? and so, quite naturally, ilooked around and found out who was doing what. and there was interesting stuffgoing on already at mit. i think pete donaldsonwas working in the--
interviewer: languages? penfield: yes, in theshakespeare project. the results of work going onin mechanical engineering-- professor paterawas doing that. there were a variety ofinteresting things going on. and i wanted our department toembrace this new technology if it possibly could. and so i organized a one-dayretreat off-campus, and out of this came the formation ofa committee to make a
recommendation about whatshould be done. and we did, and we tried todemonstrate some of the technology. in the meantime, otherpeople were starting to do other things. we contributed toward that,although i'm not sure that our report alone actuallytriggered an event. another committee was formedsomewhat later that came up with the recommendation of theopencourseware, which was an
excellent example of how the webcould be used to make the world a better placeusing sharing from mit's body of knowledge. and it reminds me that whengordon brown, in our department, decided thatengineering research, engineering science, was animportant activity for engineers to do, he made surethat other engineering department heads and deans andfaculty across the country were aware of what we were doingand what our thinking
was, to make sure that he gotthe best ideas from them and that they were able toaccomplish something similar to what we were doing. so it was, again, an exampleof mit taking a leadership role and making everybody knowwhat we were doing, and as a result, fulfilling our role,making the world a better place through a leadershiprole. and it was that day's versionof opencourseware. interviewer: so i had theopportunity to review the
report, in preparationfor this interview. moore's law notwithstanding, ithought the following was a rather bold prediction to havebeen made 16 years ago, this from the possible long-rangemodels from mit section of the final report, after a sectionpredicting networked personal computing in the dormitories. so this is from 16 years ago. the next step after that onein student computing-- parentheses, this is veryspeculative, close
parentheses-- might occur when the mit campusis wired for cellular data communication and studentshave small portable computers which they can takewith them all day for use as portable personal assistants. these computers would normallyremain turned on in continuous wireless connection with the mitnetwork, and would be as unobtrusive as, say, a notebook,and therefore welcome in all settings.
they would serve as telephones,pagers, web browsers, email handlers,notepads, calendars, and computers. it remains to be seen what newapplications would motivate their widespread use. have you looked back on thatreport recently, and are you surprised at the degree towhich the committee's predictions have come to pass? penfield: it's obvious,isn't it?
now? interviewer: that's16 years ago. yes. well, we understood whatthe technology was. we understood that these wouldprobably be hand-sized things, because human physiologyisn't going to change. the size of our hands isn'tgoing to change. the size of our minds isn'tgoing to change, or our eyes, or anything like that.
so what could we pack intosomething that you could hold in your hand? and we just judged all thesethings were reasonable candidates for being included. and today's smartphones do it. and the ipad, and allof these things. but this also required, though,the kind of wireless network connectivity thatwe didn't have then-- penfield: --but weknew would come.
we had smart peopleon that committee. interviewer: so i'd like toshift here to talk about your thoughts regarding today'sstudents, and the role of engineers in today's society. mit's motto was "mind in hand."mit's hands-on approach to learning has been a constantsince its founding 150 years ago. i understand you have concernsthat today's youngsters are not getting the hands-onexperience they need,
particularly in k through 12. what do you think should bedone to provide these opportunities, and whatrole can mit play? penfield: well, certainly theedgerton center today is playing some kind ofa role in that. the various kinds ofcompetitions that you find, the robotics competitions forexample, are an excellent example where people can geton and actually build something and program it toactually have it do something.
that's moved from being anoccupation of graduate students down to freshman, andthen down to high school, and now it's in middle schoolacross the nation. i think that's an example wherewe can get some hands-on experience. on the other hand, thisstill is a little bit removed from nature. it's a little bit differentfrom testing the laws of nature directly.
you're operating at a keyboardmost of the time, doing programming most of the time. sometimes you have to dealwith gears and motors and things of that nature. whether we can devise otherkinds of competitions that will excite people in middleschool and high school, i don't know. that's certainly oneway of doing it. interviewer: are thereopportunities with the
internet to deliver to theclassroom the kinds of experiences we'd like studentsto have before they come to mit? penfield: i don't know. it's entirely possible that theremote laboratory set up that jesus del alamo, professordel alamo in our department, has beendoing could play a role of this sort. he has been focusing hisefforts, i believe, more on
providing services to developingcountries that cannot afford laboratories. instead they do them remotely. that's different from a virtuallab in which it's simulated, because the actualexperiment is being done. it's just that it's being donein another part of the world. i think it's entirely possiblethat some kind of systems like that could be set up toenable middle school, even younger, students.
interviewer: could you talk alittle bit about your thoughts on the role of engineersin today's society? penfield: well, engineeringis a specialty. when your car doesn't work, youtake it to the garage and you hope your carmechanic knows something about his specialty. and the car mechanic probablyhad a vocational education to lead to his abilityto fix your car. on the other hand, ifsomething's wrong with your
body and you go to a doctor, youexpect the doctor not only to have his or her specialty-- whether it's cardiologyor whatever it is-- you expect not only that, butyou also expect the doctor to be a thoughtful and an importantmember of society who understands you in morethan just your body. your car mechanic probablydoesn't have to understand you more than your car,but a doctor does. now, think of how doctorsare educated.
typically, they are graduatesof liberal arts colleges or universities, generalistprograms, but then specialize after graduation. car mechanics don't do that. what should engineersdo, you think. right now, i submit that thenation has a problem because our national leaders do notknow enough science and engineering to make gut-levelreactions to controversial statements.
for example, if a lobbyist comesup and makes a statement about global warming to them,they are not in a position to intuitively understandthat it's baloney or that it's true. they simply can't make ajudgment of that sort. so they have to take otherpeople's word for it. the minute you have somebody inpower who has to take other people's words for it, thenthat person and the people represented by that person--
namely the whole country-- are held hostageby the experts. and so you have to be verycareful to get good experts. wouldn't it be better if ournational leaders had some scientific or engineeringbackground, so that those decisions that had an impact,those decisions that had useful input to come fromscience or engineering, could be made more efficiently andmore accurately that way. currently, the education ofengineers doesn't permit that,
because mit is a vocationalschool when you come right down to it. we're not a generaluniversity. i do submit the our humanitiesrequirement, our communications requirement,which i'm very proud to have played a role in implementing,do give people the skills necessary to a verygreat degree. but they are skills whichultimately are aimed at the role in whatever profession theygo into, whether it's a
chemical engineer or ametallurgist or whatever, or in our case, an electrical engineer or computer scientist. what i think would be reallywonderful is if somehow the engineering education communitycould find a way to contribute to the education ofliberal arts graduates and make a contribution to generaleducation, so that all liberal arts graduates would have agut-level feeling for some kind of engineering.
and then those that have thespecial talents needed to go on for leadership positionswould have that as a background that theycould rely on. i don't know any way todo this, exactly. i don't believe that mit coulddo this without changing its fundamental mission. or could it? i just don't know. could we collaborate with otheruniversities and do
something along this line? could individual departments,for example my own could we establish liaisons withcolleges like wellesley, for example, where some of ournational leaders are being educated today? can we make sure that wellesleyget exposure to some kind of engineering? and could we contributeto it in some way? i think those colleges thatdo provide leadership are
stressed, and the studentstaking our curricula have no place to put this. they have all the usual excusesthat can be made. but somehow, somebody has tofind a way to introduce science and engineering in away that is meaningful to today's circumstancesto those people. interviewer: paul, during yourintroduction, i cited a number of the many awards and honorsyou've received. and i also mentioned theleadership positions you've
held in a number of professionalsocieties. which of these awards andaffiliations are particularly special and why? penfield: well, one of thethings that we have not touched on is my role with theelectrical engineering department heads association. there's an association foreverything, as you can imagine, and there's one forelectrical engineering department heads.
i became involved in thisshortly after becoming department head, and i figured,this is an odd group. why would i have much incommon with other ones? but i went to it, and i realizedthat what i got out of this was an appreciationfor other universities and other colleges that hadelectrical engineering and related programs, and thedifficulties that they were having, and how they relatedto the difficulties that we were having.
in all too many cases, what idiscovered was that there were, at all too manyuniversities, organizations that were dysfunctional forsome reason or another, or hostilities withindepartments. and it was very depressing,often, talking to my colleagues from other-- i ultimately became president ofthis organization, served a year in that term, so i got toknow a lot of my colleagues from other universities.
and i learned that manyof their problems-- they had much greaterproblems than i did. and i was so glad to be ata university that has a combination of high statureand public regard, has adequate resources to do thingsthat they want, and has an understanding upper-leveladministration which has supported my efforts all the waythat they possibly could. when i talked to some ofmy colleagues at other universities, i discovered thatwe were blessed by having
a single department ofelectrical engineering and computer science. when we put it to a straw voteat one time whether they would like such a thing, all of thembasically wanted to merge with their other departments, butthey couldn't do it because there were too manypersonalities involved. at mit, the personality issue,in our department anyway, is not a major thing. we all get along very welltogether in our department.
and certainly among the variousboards and committees that i've worked on, we alsohave a great degree of collegiality, and a greatwillingness to cooperate with others. i would commend jay keyser forrunning his series of faculty dinners which encourages suchcollegiality from one department to another. i would certainly commendthe various deans i've worked with.
i don't know how many dean's iactually served under, but all of them had a degree ofcollegiality within the governance of the school ofengineering, which was very, very helpful. and certainly our focus withinthe department on undergraduate education as ourprimary mission served to unify the department in a waythat, i think, is rare at mit and elsewhere. so i really feel privileged tohave spent a career in such an
environment.