The MIT factor: celebrating 150 years of maverick genius
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has led the world into the future for 150 years with scientific innovations.
The musician Yo-Yo Ma’s cello may not be the obvious starting point for a journey into one of the world’s great universities. But, as you quickly realise when you step inside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there’s precious little going on that you would normally see on a university campus. The cello, resting in a corner of MIT’s celebrated media laboratory — a hub of creativity — looks like any other electric classical instrument. But it is much more. Machover, the composer, teacher and inventor responsible for its creation, calls it a ‘hyperinstrument’, a sort of thinking machine that allows Ma and his cello to interact with one another and make music together. ‘The aim is to build an instrument worthy of a great musician like Yo-Yo Ma that can understand what he is trying to do and respond to it,’ Machover says. The cello has numerous sensors across its body and by measuring the pressure, speed and angle of the virtuoso’s performance it can interpret his mood and engage with it, producing extraordinary new sounds. The virtuoso cellist frequently performs on the instrument as he tours around the world.
Machover’s passion for pushing at the boundaries of the existing world to extend and unleash human potential is not a bad description of MIT as a whole. This unusual community brings highly gifted, highly motivated individuals together from a vast range of disciplines, united by a common desire: to leap into the dark and reach for the unknown.
The result of that single unifying ambition is visible all around. For the past 150 years, MIT has been leading the world into the future. The discoveries of its teachers and students have become the common everyday objects that we now all take for granted. The telephone, electromagnets, radars, high-speed photography, office photocopiers, cancer treatments, pocket calculators, computers, the Internet, the decoding of the human genome, lasers, space travel … the list of innovations that involved essential contributions from MIT and its faculty goes on and on.
From the moment MIT was founded by William Barton Rogers in 1861, it was clear what it was not. While Harvard stuck to the English model of a classical education, with its emphasis on Latin and Greek, MIT looked to the German system of learning based on research and hands-on experimentation. Knowledge was at a premium, but it had to be useful.
This down-to-earth quality is enshrined in the school motto, Mens et manus – Mind and hand – as well as its logo, which shows a gowned scholar standing beside an ironmonger bearing a hammer and anvil. That symbiosis of intellect and craftsmanship still suffuses the institute’s classrooms, where students are not so much taught as engaged and inspired.
Take Christopher Merrill, 21, a third-year undergraduate in computer science. He is spending most of his time on a competition set in his robotics class. The contest is to see which student can most effectively program a robot to build a house out of blocks in under ten minutes. Merrill says he could have gone for the easiest route – designing a simple robot that would build the house quickly. But he wanted to try to master an area of robotics that remains unconquered — adaptability, the ability of the robot to rethink its plans as the environment around it changes, as would a human.
‘I like to take on things that have never been done before rather than to work in an iterative way just making small steps forward,’ he explains.
Merrill is already planning the start-up he wants to set up when he graduates in a year’s time. He has an idea for an original version of a contact lens that would augment reality by allowing consumers to see additional visual information. He is fearful that he might be just too late in taking his concept to market, as he has heard that a
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