Today, marking our present year and the year of the MIT
Sesquicentennial, we want to thank everyone who had a hand in
making this online exhibit possible. And, of course, we want to thank you, our loyal readers.

150 Years in the Stacks Team:
Michelle Baildon
Patrick Ford
Patrick Olson
Audrey Pearson
Stephen Skuce

Additional contributions by:
Patsy Baudoin
Alex Caracuzzo
Chris Donnelly
Kate Gyllensvard
Nora Murphy
Michael Noga
Tom Rosko
Ray Schmidt
Andrea Schuler
Mark Szarko

Photography: Patrick Olson and Bexx Caswell
Blog administration: Audrey Pearson
Setup and technical support: Remlee Green
Additional technical support: Darcy Duke
Concept and coordination: Stephen Skuce

To mark the official 150th anniversary of MIT’s founding in 1861, the Institute held  a massive “Next Century Convocation” on April 10, 2011 at the Boston Convention and Exposition Center.

During the festivities, the renewal of MIT’s charter – a reaffirmation of the Institute’s mission – was signed by President Susan Hockfield. Also signing were MIT’s two Presidents Emeriti, along with representatives from the MIT Corporation, the faculty, the student body, and the staff. Each of them endorsed the document – a digital “iCharter” – on an iPad.

Since May of 2010, The Lewis Music Library has made an iPad available for loan. (Currently the library is circulating an iPad 2.) It’s loaded with music apps, and with thousands of clips from new CDs in the library’s extensive collection. The iPad does a lot of very cool things right out of the box, too.

A centrally important part of the MIT Libraries’ job is to make information as accessible as possible and to deliver it in the most appropriate way. So of course the Libraries provide tens of thousands of electronic journals and databases, access to GIS and social sciences data, digital collections, and countless other resources to serve MIT’s voracious appetite for information. Providing a tool like the iPad fits comfortably within the Libraries’ tradition of welcoming new technologies and embracing new ways to serve documents, images, and data.

During research for “150 Years in the Stacks,” as we took a glance backward at the Libraries’ rich holdings, it was fun and occasionally thrilling to stumble across tangible materials we just didn’t expect to encounter. Of course digital information is crucially important to the work being done in a place like MIT. But happily there’s still room in major research libraries like ours for publications which, though they may show obvious signs of having been well-used, will sometimes wear that history with a touching eloquence.

An antislavery tract is an evocative historical document, particularly if it was written by a Virginian whose home is now an official Underground Railway site. When the author has inscribed it warmly to his friend, MIT founder William Barton Rogers, it’s a unique treasure for the Institute. You can certainly digitize such an object, but it won’t be the same as holding the original in your hand.

To be appreciated fully, some things just need to be experienced physically and in close proximity. John Stuart Mill’s 1880 Political Economy is available digitally, but our copy – a study in obsessive note taking – still has to be seen to be believed. How can any photograph convey the mindboggling skill required to create a 200-pages-plus miniature book? To enjoy a book with moveable parts, well, you need to be able to move those parts. A booklet on radar can be a dry thing, but when it contains the signatures of a team of people who seem to have done as much as anyone did to win World War II, it becomes a deeply poignant document.

There simply is no substitute for the experience of seeing, touching, and yes, even smelling a treasure like the Libraries’ copy of Peregrinus’ exceedingly rare De Magnete, published in Augsburg in 1558.

An iPad, on the other hand, gives you access to “150 Years in the Stacks.”

We’ll call it a toss-up.

Victorians filled auditoriums to hear presentations by the leading scientific lights of their day. Michael Faraday’s lectures on electricity and magnetism, for example, were wildly popular and people jammed every hall in which he appeared.

But for all their interest in the sciences, Victorians could have trouble distinguishing between legitimate lines of scientific inquiry and what author Sherrie Lynne Lyons calls “marginal science.” The latter isn’t limited only to deliberate charlatanism and quackery, though.

Theories that we now perceive as pseudoscience, or even just plain nonsense, might at one time have been perceived as entirely rational scientific questions, well worth investigating. Sometimes very serious people with very serious intentions pursue paths that seem silly in hindsight but which, in the immortal phrase, “seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Charles Lyell – distinguished geologist, member of the Royal Society, sane person, and good friend of Charles Darwin – admitted that he “believed in the sea serpent without ever having seen it.” William Crookes, a productive, respected, and accomplished 19th century chemist and physicist, developed a serious interest in spiritualism. They were not alone, Lyons tells us, and their pursuits did not make them quacks.

Consider: the MIT Libraries’ Vail Collection was assembled during the Victorian era. It’s one of the world’s most important collections of books on electricity, electrical engineering, magnetism, and allied sciences … and it also contains material on “animal magnetism.” Because no one could account for the vital force that animated living beings, theories proliferated. Among them was the idea that a magnetic “fluid” of some sort lay within, and could be transferred between, sentient creatures. Serious investigations into “animal magnetism,” of course, could easily diverge into questions about spiritualism, mesmerism, psychic phenomena, and so on.

Thus the Vail Collection contains 17th century books on witchcraft; the complete multi-year run of a serious 19th century journal produced by the Society for Psychical Research; and even books on palm reading.

Today we congratulate ourselves for dismissing such seemingly ridiculous concepts as phrenology and palmistry, and for denying the existence of sea serpents. But one of the most difficult aspects of the scientific enterprise is the question asked at the outset: which phenomena actually merit serious scientific investigation? It’s only with the luxury of hindsight that such questions seem easy to answer.

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Early in 2007, Charles Morris emailed his publisher. “I think we’re heading for the mother of all crashes,” he wrote.  “It will happen in summer of 2008, I think.” At the same time, our nation’s financial leaders, both in Washington and on Wall Street, were telling Congress that the U.S. economy was in beautiful shape. Unfortunately, it was Morris who turned out to be right.

In his foreword, the author treats us to a simplified account of the credit bubble. “Not long ago,” he writes, “the sum of all financial assets – stocks, bonds, loans, mortgages, and the like, which are claims on real things – were about equal to global GDP. Now they are approaching four times global GDP.” He likens this situation to an inverted pyramid, which becomes more wobbly as you pile on more claims. “And when large, wobbly objects tumble, they go very fast.”

In this volume deemed a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and a Best Book of 2008 by The Economist, Morris explains for the layman, in crystal clear prose, what got us into this Great Recession. Or maybe we should say what Morris predicted would cause this Great Recession, since he wrote much of the book before the market crashed.

Morris himself is a former lawyer and banker. In fact, he ran a company that built the software that enabled bankers to create the sophisticated credit instruments that landed us in this mess. He was dismayed by what bankers were doing with his software. “This is crazy,” he said in a 2008 interview with NPR. “I was sure that people weren’t keeping track of the trends so they had proper margins and collateral and so forth.” The credit instruments were too complex and the volume of trading too high to realistically gauge the risk. The inverted pyramid eventually tumbled.

There is hope, Morris claims, but only with increased regulation of the financial markets. And only if American consumers, too, can curb their tendencies to spend with so much borrowed cash.

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Junot Díaz is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing in MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. His first book, a collection of short stories called Drown, met with critical acclaim when it was published in 1996, becoming a national bestseller and winning a PEN/Malamud Award. A decade later, his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, generated even more buzz. In addition to ending 2007 on several “best-of” lists, the book also won several major awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize.

The novel moves back and forth between the United States and the Dominican Republic as it weaves together several narrative strands from different characters to tell the story of the de Léon family over the course of several decades. In the prologue, the narrator, Yunior, describes a curse known colloquially as the fukú, which Dominicans trace back to the arrival of Columbus, and blame for misfortunes both personal and historical. The title character, Oscar de Léon, is tormented by fukús big and small. Overweight, socially awkward, a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, Oscar fails to fit in anywhere, and his story is both funny and heartbreaking.

References to fantasy, science fiction, and American popular culture sit side by side with more elevated literary references; the book opens with a quotation from the comic book Fantastic Four that’s followed by a Derek Walcott poem. Díaz’s narrator frequently mixes Spanish with English, and uses footnotes not so much to explain certain references as to expand on them, much as a musician’s solo will augment and build on the basic tune of a song.

Díaz doesn’t spell everything out, and the reader’s experience is not unlike that of an immigrant who must learn a new language and culture by picking things up along the way, or sometimes just rolling with it.

Yet the effect is never alienating, and you could say that Oscar Wao is more than a novel: it’s a deeply rewarding and immersive experience.

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This photo documentary profiles seven women, largely through their own words, all of them currently or formerly housecleaners in Orange County, CA. There’s Sara Velazquez, an immigrant who crossed the river into Laredo on an inner tube and nearly cried when asked during her first interview about her children back in Mexico. There’s Tina Parker, an Orange County native whose mother pulled her out of school when she was a child (ostensibly to be home schooled, but really to be taken door to door as a Jehovah’s Witness).

Leidi Mejia, originally from Guatemala, enrolled in a cosmetology program – with classes offered only in English – and earned straight A’s. Victoria Rua left an abusive father in Mexico, only to find that the shame of her mother’s infidelities had followed her to the States. Sharon Risley, born and raised in Laguna Beach, earned her BFA twenty-six years after an unexpected teen pregnancy derailed her original plans. Esperanza Mejia, Leidi’s sister, took up housecleaning after two very unpleasant stints as a nanny. Julieta Noemi (Mimi) Lopez stopped cleaning houses just before giving birth to her son. Then, unable to afford their Orange County apartment on her husband’s salary alone, the family eventually moved in with a relative here in Boston.

All seven of these women rank among what Frank Cancian calls “the elite of domestic workers.” While he does profile two white Orange County natives, he makes it a point to underscore the dramatic increase in the number of Latina domestic workers in recent decades. “In the Los Angeles area Latinas were 86 percent of female household employees in 2000,” he writes. “They were 23 percent in 1970.”

The women generally live within the same county as the families whose houses they clean, but they dwell in starkly different worlds. Cleaners live inland in places like Santa Ana; their clients live along the coast in Newport Beach. It comes as no surprise to read that “per capita income in Newport Beach is more than five times that in Santa Ana.”

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Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil (MIT class of 1970) defines the Singularity as “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.” This prediction is based on the idea that information technology develops exponentially, and that this development occurs at a predictable rate, resulting in accelerating returns. Given such an exponential rate of growth, Kurzweil, in considering our future, argues that

we won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress … (when measured by today’s rate of progress), or about one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.

Kurzweil gives dates for a number of his predictions. For example, he predicts that reverse engineering of the human brain will be achieved by the year 2029. This event will help lead us into the Singularity itself, which Kurzweil predicts will occur in 2045.

As with any technological development, there will be benefits and risks. The Singularity may allow us to improve our medical knowledge to the point where we are able to live indefinitely, using nanobots to repair our bodies as they break down. But at the same time, it could lead to artificial intelligence that is unfriendly to humankind. It’s very difficult to predict how people will apply highly advanced technologies in the future.

Whether or not you agree with all of Kurzweil’s claims, it’s impossible to refute the steady increase in the acceleration of technological progress over the past hundred years. Nor can anyone deny that the rate of progress is likely to continue increasing. Great advances lay in our future. Let’s hope we’re prepared, mentally and ethically, to deal with them.

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The theory of everything – not to be confused with unified field theory, which is related but different – has been the Holy Grail of theoretical physics for centuries. The successful theory would explain all physical phenomena in the universe, making it possible, in theory, to predict the outcome of any experiment. “And while it will likely be expressed through abstract mathematics,” Dan Falk suggests, “the ideas at the heart of the theory may turn out to be extremely simple – so simple, in fact, that the essence of the theory can be written on a T-shirt.”

Falk’s popular account of the Theory of Everything, which won two awards after its original publication in Canada in 2002, explores both the theory’s history and its frontiers. Beginning with Thales and the science of ancient Greece, Falk traces relevant scientific progress through the Middle Ages, touches on Galileo and Newton, Einstein and Bohr, and brings us around to today’s theorists and the concept of string theory – the current frontrunner for the Theory of Everything.

“String theorists aren’t uncorking the champagne just yet, however,” Falk notes.

The biggest problem is that the theory describes how particles and forces behave at enormously high energies.  Even the largest particle accelerators are about a billion billion times too weak to probe string effects by any direct experiment … To investigate strings directly, in fact, would require an accelerator roughly the size of the solar system.

While a viable theory seems out of reach for now, it should come as no surprise that members of MIT’s faculty have contributed to the pursuit of this scientific grail. And if someone here at the Institute were to articulate such a theory, making what might well be the greatest scientific discovery of all time, we certainly wouldn’t be opposed to uncorking that champagne.

If we’re lucky, it might happen next year, when Dan Falk will be a visiting Knight Fellow at MIT.

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“The idea of a publication that changes format and continually morphs and redefines itself is intriguing” – Variety

Intriguing and continually morphing in every imaginable way, Visionaire is an art and fashion publication issued in numbered, limited editions, three times a year since 1991. For each issue, artists, photographers, and fashion designers work with Visionaire‘s editors to interpret a particular theme and produce a volume in a format that’s unique to that issue – and generally unlike any format encountered in a traditional print publication. Each volume is visually rich and pretty irresistible; you want to pick it up and look at it, touch it, even play with it. One issue of Visionaire actually requires employment of your taste buds.

The MIT Libraries own a number of these extraordinary volumes, and their diverse formats and themes illustrate the variety in the series as a whole. Volume 50 “Artist toys,” for example, consists of a set of 10 nesting dolls designed by Alex Katz, Kurt Vonnegut, R.Crumb, and other artists, while Volume 54 “Sport” is a “wearable publication” housing 3 Lacoste polo shirts screened with photographs.

The New Yorker described Visionaire as “a creative playground for leading designers, artists, photographers, and thinkers. It’s a gallery in print. A cabinet of irresistible curiosities. A daring iconoclast dressed to thrill.” Volume 55 “Surprise” is literally a cabinet; its purple doors open to reveal several slim books. Each evokes childhood memories with its pop-up format, but each also has a decidedly modern artistic twist.

The volume for 2003, entitled “World,” gives readers a glimpse into where photographers including Craig McDean, Nan Goldin, David Byrne, Satoshi Saikusa, and 150 other contributors from around the world live, work, come from, or simply like to be. The photos are bound in orange corduroy and housed in a matching Gap tote bag created exclusively for Visionaire. MIT’s copy is number 1370 of a numbered, limited edition of 4000 copies.

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Santiago Calatrava is among the most celebrated architects working today. His bridges don’t merely span gaps between two points, and his buildings don’t merely enclose space. All of Calatrava’s structures are highly sculptural and dramatic, and they sometimes test the limits of technology. Fear not; he is also a structural engineer.

But that’s not all. Calatrava creates designs for opera, ballet, and theater; he paints; he sculpts. His work in all its variety has been the subject of exhibitions in major museums worldwide.

Calatrava’s soaring, winged design for the transportation hub at the World Trade Center site in New York is currently under construction. His dramatic, 2005 “Turning Torso” skyscraper in Malmö, Sweden, has won multiple awards, as have numerous other Calatrava structures.

It was as an architect and structural engineer that, in 1997, Calatrava was invited to MIT for three days of lectures. He interacted with professionals, with faculty, and with students from the departments of architecture and civil engineering. “The MIT Lectures” were a hit, and were later released in book form.

Some time after his visit, his office sent several books by and about Calatrava to MIT, with the architect’s compliments – but not only with his compliments. The volumes were also hand-decorated and signed by Calatrava himself. Each title page carried a color sketch, with Calatrava’s signature.

Books concerning specific structures, books on bridges, on museum exhibitions of Calatrava’s work, books containing portraits or depictions of animals – all were individually decorated and signed by the architect/artist.

The title page of today’s entry, Portraits, is decorated with an elegant, classical profile in graphite and watercolor. Along with the other decorated Calatrava volumes, it’s housed in the Limited Access Collection of MIT’s Rotch Library of Architecture and Planning.

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