John G. King '50, PhD '53

INTERVIEWER: Today is December 15, 2011. My name is Larry Gallagher, and today I have the pleasure of talking to John King as part of the MIT 150 Infinite History project. Professor King was born in London, England in 1925. He attended MIT as both an undergraduate and a graduate student, receiving his PhD in physics in 1953 and joining the faculty soon afterward.

During his 43 years teaching at MIT, Dr. King introduced a variety of new approaches to teaching physics, emphasizing hands-on learning and independent thought. As a young professor, he also contributed to the production of several educational movies, and throughout his career has worked to present physics to ever-wider audiences. Professor King is an accomplished experimental physicist, best known for his null experiments, his invention of the molecular microscope, and his pioneering work on atomic clocks. Dr. King has received many awards for his work as an educator and a physicist, including the Alfred P. Sloan Award and the Oersted Medal from the American Association of Physics Teachers. He is now the Francis Freedman Professor of Physics Emeritus at MIT.

Welcome, Dr. King.

KING: Thank you.

INTERVIEWER: Can you please start by telling us a bit about where you grew up?

KING: I grew up largely in France and went to the local state-run school. And then my mother had married a Frenchman, and so they lived there in a place where they were the first to introduce bottled milk into the local village. Before that, it was in a big vat. And then later I went to school in Switzerland, and eventually I came back to the US, went to a number of schools, and ended up at Phillips Exeter Academy.

INTERVIEWER: Was there an aha moment when you realized you had a special aptitude in the sciences?

KING: Yes. Because first, my stepfather had taught me a lot about the sort of elementary intuitive mechanics of car repair and carpentry and so on, which there's a lot of physics when you pull a nail out with a claw hammer. And then at Exeter, I found friends who knew about radio, and so I got involved with building radios and then mono systems, high fidelity, with 78 RPM, for students and faculty members there. And so I learned a lot about how to assemble. I also made public address systems for state fairs and things like that. And here, as a 14- or 15-year-old kid, I had to have people drive me with my 46L6's in push-pull parallel, but never mind that.

INTERVIEWER: So who is it that advised you to go to Philips Exeter?

KING: Well actually, I was taken by my mother to look at different prep schools, and it was somehow instinctive. I liked it, so I went.

INTERVIEWER: And then how did MIT first appear on your radar screen?

One of the science teachers there, a man named Bert Little, who had actually been at Harvard, said, you should consider not only Harvard, but MIT, because you'd probably find this sort of technical interest you have very resonant there. I mean, that's my vague memory of it.

And so in some automatic way, I signed up. And it was relatively easy for me to get in. I got a fairly good average at Exeter. And I came here in June, late May, or '43-- probably June.

INTERVIEWER: I read that you have written that you spent three summer months as a freshman at MIT in 1943, and returned to MIT from the Navy in the fall of 1946.

KING: That's right.

INTERVIEWER: Please explain.

KING: Well, after I'd been there for three months, I realized I was going to be drafted. And as a sort of only child living in a protected environment, I wasn't very enthusiastic about the idea, as you might imagine. And so I wondered-- could I get some kind of war work using my electronic knowledge that would defer me?

So first I go to the Rad Lab-- Radiation. And they say, oh, we have 3,000 people, you can't do it. And then I go to the Servo Lab, and Gordon Brown, then in charge, after I tell him how wonderful I am, says, well, why don't you be director and I'll be janitor?

INTERVIEWER: And this is as a freshman?

KING: As a freshman, yes-- 18 years old. And so I've sometimes, in decades after, reminded him of this.

But then I went to the Harvard Underwater Sound Lab, and they took me in. And I was very effective, because I could work late hours-- I had no family, I worked late hours. I built a circular control panel for an acoustic torpedo with about 24 vacuum tubes and relays and dangling clip leads.

And finally I was drafted and inducted into the army, as it happens, in January of '44. And the Underwater Sound lab said, we need that kid. So they got in touch with somebody in Washington. And then I went to Fort Devens. I spend a week there repairing radios instead of going out immediately. I went to Camp Edison for the Signal Corps. And then suddenly, the first sergeant said, King, you're going into the Navy. I said, what? I didn't know anything about it.

And so I go up to Samson, New York. I get boot camp, and I'm about to get into torpedo school, submarine school in New London, when I get a message saying, you're going back to Harvard. And that's May of '44.

INTERVIEWER: But now you're going back to Harvard as an enlisted--

KING: Enlisted man, in the Navy, to work on acoustic torpedo guidance. And then at the end of the war, in '45, Harvard gets rid of the underwater sound lab. It moves to Penn State, the Ordnance Research Lab, and I go there until June of '46. And then I'm discharged, and I come to MIT, even though people I worked with at the underwater sound lab had recommended Harvard.

And actually, I was admitted to Harvard. Spent a day there, and the first day they put me in a giant hall with 800 others and we took a stupid exam. And I said, the heck with this. I'm going back to MIT.

INTERVIEWER: So during World War II, then, you actually served in the various labs you just described, including up the street at Harvard.

KING: That's right. And that lab is in a building called the Hemingway Gymnasium, which is still there. It's back to being a gymnasium.

INTERVIEWER: So here you are. You've been admitted to MIT. You spend three months there that summer. Was it common for students to get plucked out of MIT, to get drafted?

KING: Well, when you got to be 18, yes. The answer is certainly. Everybody, the moment you got to be 18, you had a physical exam, and you were given-- often it would be weeks or months. But I remember going down to Commonwealth Avenue in some big place, and they handed me a copy of the New Testament, and gave me another physical, and then said, you get on the train and arrive at Fort Devens.

INTERVIEWER: So college students at the time weren't exempt.

KING: No, not at all that I can think of, no. That's not until the next-- Vietnam.

INTERVIEWER: So then it could've been a natural progression after you spent this time at Harvard for you to have entered as a freshman at Harvard.

KING: Yes. And as I say, I just didn't like the atmosphere. And somehow--

INTERVIEWER: So you came back to MIT.

KING: Yeah. Oh, I remember what it was. They said, you have to live in a Harvard house and you have to produce a $500 bond, or something. Against tuition-- in case-- I mean, I had a GI Bill thing. Or maybe it was for rent or something. That was the real reason.

And at that time, I was living with another guy up in Arlington, and we shared a primitive house, with $100, $140 a month rent between us, and I was very comfortable there, and so I didn't want to live in the dormitory. And so that's why I came to MIT. Trivial reasons.

INTERVIEWER: So you went there in 1946 with a number of returning World War II veterans.

KING: I'd say roughly half the class.

INTERVIEWER: So what was that like?

KING: Well, it meant, first, the veterans were more likely to be smoking, which was far more universal. And in fact, I remember people smoked even in the lecture halls. I guess they stopped when the lecture started, but it was commonplace.

And also, the veterans were more sharper in questioning, more forward-moving, perhaps more adversarial in a way. And the freshmen were much less so. Now I would say, in my relatively recent experience, the freshmen are quite a bit more advanced, and there aren't any veterans. There are very few older students.

INTERVIEWER: So I would also imagine the veterans were far more motivated and focused than the freshmen. But there could have been, in some instances, a delta of five, six, seven years of age between--

KING: That's right, precisely. I think the most common was maybe three or four, but there certainly were extremes.

INTERVIEWER: Right. Interesting. So once you started at MIT, what determined or influenced your course of study?

KING: Well first, of all introductory courses, the one I liked best was physics, with a man named Sanborn Brown, Sandy Brown. And actually, he's a person I had quite a lot to do with. And the lectures, I thought, were illuminating and interesting, and I liked the subject matter. But of course I'd already liked it at Exeter, where Little had encouraged me to do experiments on my own. So I remember quite a few of those in which I had built crude apparatuses and measured things. So I was already sort of set to do physics. And I remember being somewhat interested in electrical engineering, but not enough.

And I remember the fact that when I got there, because of my extensive experience, I didn't have to go to all the freshmen labs, which gave me extra time. That was the deal I had with Sandy Brown. But in actual fact, when I did go, I enjoyed them. And I was also aware of the fact that a fair number of students didn't enjoy them. And in fact, I don't mind listening to lectures and trying to figure out what's going on, and being attentive, and trying to understand the extreme foreign accent that sometimes was there, and getting used to it. Those all seem very interesting. And yet I'm aware that it puts off a lot of kids, so.

INTERVIEWER: I read where you described the work you did on your senior thesis as, quote, "the first of many experiments of that type that I've done-- bold, novel, interesting, but not leading anywhere." End quote. Can you talk about that, and the balance throughout your career between those types of experiments and experiments that did lead somewhere.

KING: Well naturally, that was my senior thesis. And maybe if I did it with more modern methods, it would probably work now. But then, who needs it? Actually, it was an attempt to detect hydrogen atoms by attaching an electron to it, making H minus, which you then can deflect and measure in a mass spectrometer.

But when I got into the lab as a graduate student, I first helped another guy doing any kind of experiment that I sometimes characterize as "urinalysis." And by that I mean that everybody produces samples, and they go to some lab.

And there are more than 100 elements, starting with hydrogen, and one wants to measure all their properties. And one of the properties, the techniques that Rabi and coworkers had developed at Columbia in the late '30s, before the war, enabled one to figure out how the magnetic and electric properties of the nucleus, interacting with electrons surrounding the nucleus and making the atom, to learn about the properties of the nucleus, which then in turn can be interpreted by theorists who were trying to understand how nuclei are put together.

Well since there are, along with the isotopes, many dozens of nuclei to study, and in particular, the halogens-- there's fluorine, first one, and then chlorine, and then bromine, and then iodine, and then astatine, which is very heavy. And then each one has two or three isotopes. So you can therefore measure the properties of all of these, and that's why I call urinalysis, each sample I studied. And these are all in tables, in books.

And so my coworker, Vincent Jaccarino who went to Bell Labs, then went to UC Santa Barbara-- he was a graduate student the year ahead of me, two years. He measured the hyperfine structure of nuclear moments of a stable chlorine isotopes. I measured the hyperfine structure and nuclear moments of the stable bromine isotopes. Then together we measured iodine, and there we found a new thing, another aspect of the nucleus. And then a graduate student of mine, Howard Brown, now at NYU, and I measured bromine again with better technique, and we measured the same property of that nucleus that we'd done with iodide.

So that's the sort of standard way that a lot of research goes on. And sometimes some terrific thing comes out of it, and other times it just goes plodding along, and you've got a lot of work. And it isn't that it isn't valuable. It just doesn't do anything extraordinary.

And then the other kind of experiments-- they come from an imaginative stimulus from somewhere. Now the one that I'm, quote, "most famous for" is the absolute equality, that is, ignoring plus and minus, of the proton and electron charge. But I did that with a technique, a much-improved modernized technique, that had already been done in 1925, my birth year, as it happens, because Albert Einstein had had the idea that charges might be slightly different, and that this would mean that the earth had a net charge, and since it's rotating, it might be the source of the Earth's magnetic field.

Well, a couple of physicists in Switzerland blew that one apart with an experiment they did, and I did it quite a few orders of magnitude later. It had developed a new interest because of what it would have on a cosmological scale if atoms were not completely neutral. In other words, if the universe, besides having black holes and dark matter and dark energy and planets and stars also has many atoms in this space in between, just floating around. And they would all be interacting through this very weak electric field if they weren't-- so there was some effort to look into it.

And so that stimulated me, and in fact, it was a physicist at Harvard whose name I can't remember who told Zach about it, and Zach told me the story, and I looked up the paper that these guys had published about this, and I said, oh, I'll do the experiment. And I'm actually doing a refined version of it at this very minute. And now I hope--

INTERVIEWER: Excuse me, but you just mentioned Zach. I wanted to explore that a little bit with you. He was your thesis adviser, eventual colleague. In your writings, you describe a relationship with him that was not without its share of challenges.

KING: Yes. Well, it's because first of all, as a thesis adviser, it amounted to him coming through the lab about every other month and just saying, how's it going?

INTERVIEWER: We're talking about Jerrold Zacharias.

KING: Jerrold Zacharias. So he wasn't doing any real supervising in the sense of-- the students would come to the supervisor and say, the experiment isn't working. And then you go down and you look at the apparatus, and you say, well, you forgot to plug in the hm. Or it turns out the contacts are dirty, so you use contact spray, which I was using only last night on my television set. People don't know these trivial things, and no matter how elaborate the thing, if you wiggle the contacts and there's noise, you've got trouble.

So in that sense he wasn't advising, you see. But he--

INTERVIEWER: So you had this world-famous physicist, your thesis advisor.

KING: Yes. And what he does is, when I have the thesis finally ready at 5 o'clock on a Monday afternoon, the deadline, and my wife has typed it with carbon copies, and I've put in the equations in India ink and all that, I go up to Belmont at 5 o'clock-- here's the thesis.

And Zach says to me-- I later called him Jerrold, but Zach-- says, where's the data? And I said, after page of 152, or whatever. And he takes it, and pulls that out, and hands the rest of it back. Because what he does is, he circulates these numbers among fellow people in the business and says, now we've done this. Not interested in the details.

INTERVIEWER: What was your reaction? That must have been somewhat devastating.

KING: No. I felt that he didn't probably need to read-- I mean, I had to write a story. Like, first I had to say, theoretical background. Well, he is not terribly interested, and has known about it, but has probably forgotten about it, doesn't need to know. Then details of the apparatus. The apparatus isn't terribly different from the last one. It's always tricky-- bromine is a toxic vapor, and comes in the form of a molecule-- two bromine atoms. Now you have to take the atoms apart somehow, the molecules, to make a beam of atoms-- and I invented a new way of doing that, but so what?

So that's how that-- I think it wasn't really interesting. It's just like, many people don't want to read a long news story that builds up. They want to know, what was the result?

INTERVIEWER: Very early in your career, you became involved in improving teaching methods, particularly around the teaching of physics. That has clearly been a lifelong passion of yours. Can you talk about your involvement in the Physical Science Study Committee, founded 1956?

KING: Yes. Well, you should know a little bit about how that came about. Zacharias, by the way, was a consultant to many companies-- not many, but perhaps six, four, I don't know-- and started some consulting companies. And he employed me here, and got me jobs there, thus supplementing my salary, for which I'm grateful to this day.

And one of his consulting jobs was with the Kerr-McGee Oil Company in Oklahoma. I think I got that right. I don't know what it was in detail. But when he was out there, he was asked to go to one of the high schools, and he talked to them about what they knew about physics. And they didn't know anything about why the earth is thought to be round, and why gravity acts the way it does. They just didn't know anything. And that made him say, high school physics is terrible.

And so he comes back. Well, at the same time, Sputnik has just been launched that very year-- '56, I think I have it right. And he takes advantage of this sudden fear that we are falling behind technically to start this program. But in the meantime, he's been influenced by Edwin Land, who came to MIT, spent some time talking to students-- and I've always said, the student who talks to Land is not absolutely typical. He was a nice enough guy, but somewhat formidable.

But out of that came the three ideas that I think two of which have been extremely important. The one that was less important was the notion of replacing lectures by well-designed films. And there were probably several reasons why it didn't work. Lecturers who are impassioned lecturers don't want to be upstaged by movies or replaced by movies.

And secondly, movies are thought of as a casual, not very serious mode, just like what you're watching now, and therefore, why should they pay attention? Whereas the lecture, you're supposed to sit in this mildly uncomfortable seat and look at the scribbled notes on the thing here. And in those days, there would be some sleeping students at the back. Now I see students with their iPads. But the ones in front were deeply interested. So movies somehow just never really got going.

INTERVIEWER: What were the two things that did work?

KING: One was the idea that students should have a desk in every lab. And the initial response-- and Zacharias was very good about that. He would have undergraduates in the molecular beam lab. But the general reaction was, what? You're going to be bringing an inexperienced student in to work on my infrared spectrometer with delicate this and that and so forth? Why, he'll make a mess of it. But Land said, but what if the student were accompanied-- I'm making a guess-- by $10,000? Which in 1964 was a lot of money. Like, $100,000 now, or $30-- whatever it is.

And so by putting out a certain amount of money, he bribed our faculty. And once it gets going, it turns out to be very good. Because undergraduates tend to be not as tired as graduate students. And they are plenty smart, and they learn the business.

And of course the other idea-- he wanted to have faculty be advisors to students. Because when I was an undergraduate at MIT, I would see my advisor after waiting to the scheduled time for about one minute, and he'd say, John are these the courses you're taking? I'd say, yes. And then he'd go, pumf! And there I'd go. No advice. And then if I wanted to drop a course, I could see him again. Or add one. Anyway.

Land wanted much more. And he had the idea of senior faculty being hired to take 10 students and tell them about the world, you see. Well, that turned into the seminar, the freshman seminar system. I don't know whether it goes on now, but it was a good thing.

INTERVIEWER: It does, yes. In fact, I just saw a quote here-- Land's quote in a presentation he made when he was talking about what was to become UROP-- said, "It would cherish and nurture the dreams of greatness that these young men bring with them when they come to the university, in particular by giving each of them, from the start, a research project of his own."

KING: Well, that's slightly extreme. I mean, I wouldn't characterize myself as having dreams of glory or anything like that.

INTERVIEWER: Very early in your career, you became involved in improving teaching methods, particularly around the teaching of physics. That has clearly been a lifelong passion of yours. Can you talk about your involvement in the physical science study committee, founded in 1956?

KING: Yes. Well, when I learned about Zach having started this and so on, and wanting to make movies, he talked to me about the first movie that I might have made. And at that time, I'd been involved somewhat with that atomic clock project. And so he said, why don't you make one on clocks? And so I did.

And as it happens, I got a copy recently. I looked at it. And it starts off with intervals that we're aware of, like seconds and years, and at the opposite extreme, nanoseconds and then very long periods. And then the notion of pendulums, and then Harold Edgerton makes an appearance, showing how he can make a picture in a fraction of a millisecond. And then there's this brief discussion of atomic time, and--

INTERVIEWER: And what were the objectives of these films?

KING: It was just to give a student an overall picture of something they might not have thought of much. And of course, in some ways, from a philosophical point of view, time is one of those mysteries that we deal with.

INTERVIEWER: And were these to be shown in high schools?

KING: They were to be shown in high schools, but of course that's something that never really became widespread, I would say.

INTERVIEWER: So what were your impressions of the whole filmmaking process? Was this an exciting project for a young faculty member to be involved in?

KING: Oh, yes, it was. You would show up at 9 o'clock, and be in the studio, in this converted movie theater, and there would be powerful lights, and gaffers, and all of the people of film making, and you would have-- trying to think of the primitive microphones and things of the time. And then the fact that a take would be interrupted by a single fly buzzing around the microphone.

And I made about three or four movies. Others, not the time and clocks one which I just mentioned, but others were based on lecture demonstrations that I had made for my teaching.

INTERVIEWER: Now were these films showing at MIT?

KING: Yes. We showed them at MIT. And at one time, I had a project in which they were shown in the hall automatically. But since everything was on 16-millimeter film, you had to-- I think we did find a continuous looping system. But they're not all that durable, so you have to watch it.

INTERVIEWER: So how would you the gauge the success of those films in achieving their intended objective?

KING: Well, my feeling is, probably not very successful. But like so many things that aren't successful, they have little effects that influence individuals here and there, and then go on to be more important. For instance, some people may write a famous textbook that is too difficult, but then people pirate it, and so it has its effect. So I think those movies stimulated a certain number of people, but you'd be hard-put to make any real statement about it.

INTERVIEWER: And this project went on for a number of years.

KING: Yes, until well into the '60s. I think my last movie was in '64 or '65.

INTERVIEWER: Are those are available for viewing now?

KING: Well first of all, the EDC out there in Watertown I think may have copies of them, but they're very nasty about letting you have them. And then there's a fellow in Louisiana who collects films, and he sent me this last summer "Photons and Interference of Photons." No, "Photons and Time and Clocks." And so I have copies. And what he did, is he videotaped them off 16-millimeter films.

INTERVIEWER: So speaking of films, I know that Edwin Land, who was also a guest teacher at MIT in 1956, had some interesting ideas around the use of film in education. Can you talk about that?

KING: Yes. Well, he probably was responding to students he spoke to who said, the lectures are boring. And there are at least three or four kinds of students. There are people who are curious about everything-- and I consider myself in that category. And so they try to figure out what the lecture is doing, and what it means, and what it says, and they're interested in it fundamentally.

And then there are other students who say, well, it's just like in the book. Why should I listen to the lectures? And actually, occasionally I've had that feeling. When I was terribly busy with something else, I'd say, never mind. I won't pay attention to lectures. I will miss them because they're just like the book. And at home I'd say, I'm not going to read the book. I'll go to the lectures.

Actually, it was a course called Advanced Calculus for Engineers, and it was the worst grade I ever got for that reason. Anyway, by the way, the final was transcribing half your homework into the final book, which was open book. But I hadn't done the homework, so I had to do it de novo. So I ended up getting an L. Do you know about--?

INTERVIEWER: I don't know about L.

KING: HCPL? That's MIT's grading system. F then follows. L is Low. Honors, Credit, Pass, Low, Flunk. For many decades.

INTERVIEWER: Okay, that I was not aware, no.

KING: All right. So I'm only going to say that the lecturing business was to be replaced by films, because the students said to Land, the lectures are boring. Some students did. And he thought, well, the great lecturers could be filmed, and then it could be shown repeatedly. That didn't really happen.

INTERVIEWER: Are you a fan at all of-- this is an aside-- but of the Walter Lewin physics lectures?

KING: Yes, he's a superb lecturer. And I could only say that, again, if it were filmed, it might not be so effective. In my experience I had a group of 30 students who sat in the front row that loved my lectures, and the remaining 270 were variously uninterested. Lewin, I think, is the other way around. The ones who are like me find it a little too forceful, and sort of noisy, and so on.

But I might be wrong. He's a great guy, though. Love his book.

INTERVIEWER: Yes. Oh, great. Yeah, I've recently read it myself.

I'll just mention him because this is an example of where there is some great benefit of capturing a master of his craft, and then others being able to enjoy that. Via video online right now.

Can you talk about how, as a visiting professor at MIT, Edward Land contributed to the establishment of MIT's UROP, or Undergraduate Research Opportunities, program?

KING: Okay. I should first mention that his name is Edwin Land. If it says Edward--

INTERVIEWER: No, I'm sorry. It's Edwin, yes.

KING: And his nickname was Din. Anyway, Edwin Land, again, talked to students and thought about his own career. He went to Harvard without knowing anything about it. And there's an unauthorized biography of him that I read 20 years ago-- 10 years ago? Trying to think. Anyway, I read the biography, but unfortunately I don't remember it in detail.

But he went to Harvard, and in some degree, they forced him to follow the standard path. And he wanted to develop Polaroid. So he dropped out of Harvard, like so many clever people, went to New York City, and in a basement made Polaroid. Nice first attempts. And then developed it, tried it out as eyeglasses for possibly automobile headlights, to avoid glare, and then became useful for better vision in the military during the war, and started the company, and then got into the photography business, and was tremendously always very interested in photography.

And in some ways, therefore, he was somebody who would have liked to have had a UROP project at Harvard in 1930 or '29 or whenever it was. And so, therefore, he said they should have them at MIT. And it's one of MIT's great successes which has been copied elsewhere, but not, I think, with as remarkable an effect.

INTERVIEWER: Then he seeded that program, didn't he?

KING: Yes. He did it with money. And that's fair enough, because the idea of an undergraduate in the lab was worrisome to many, and it turns out to generally work. And not everyone-- I think 80 percent of our students take some UROP, but they don't take it all four years, and sometimes it doesn't work. But so what? The fact is, it's an available option, and every year there's some really wonderful things that I read about that people have invented. And I've had quite a few UROP students, but usually they became my senior thesis students, so I sort of knew them all along.

INTERVIEWER: Was Edwin Land aware of the fact that this caught on?

KING: Oh yes, I'm sure he was. Because he suggested it, got it going in the '60s, and he certainly didn't-- I don't know when he died. '89, '90? Somewhere in there.

INTERVIEWER: Getting back to your teaching at MIT. You had been put in charge of the freshman physics labs starting in 1953, and in 1961, you were put in charge of designing all physics labs at MIT. Over the next 40 years or so, you introduced a number of significant innovations. Can you talk briefly about a sampling of these innovations, starting with Project Lab?

KING: Yes. Well, first of all, one of Zacharias' educational things was to have Project Lab, in which, as suggested, a student would do some kind of research that would be a project, as opposed to the labs that we don't have in the physics department anymore, where 24 or 30 students working in pairs work with an already put together apparatus that demonstrates something that they've learned about in class, and the lab is supervised by a theoretical graduate student who has zero interest in it, and by a tired, crusty technician who maintains the apparatus.

Now when I took those labs, I enjoyed them, because I like all that kind of stuff. But I could see that it was only 10 percent of the grade, and it was ignored. So I got rid of those, and I replaced it by Project Lab for the enthusiasts. And every MIT student had to take a Project Lab, but it didn't have to be in their department. That was one of Zacharias' things. And the other part was to be Corridor Lab, which was the showcases in the world where people could do it at any time.

And by 1964, Project Lab was started, and there I would sit down with pairs of students who had filled out a questionnaire, and whose interests were matching to some degree. Like they both played tennis-- that was their principal sport. Or they played the violin. And so you'd say, well, what do you know about how a violin works? And they'd discover how complicated it is, how there are hundreds of people worldwide studying, why is a Stradivarius better?

And so they get involved. They spent about ten hours a week working, of which six are in the lab, from noon until 6 o'clock, in pairs, and they learn how to use oscilloscopes, and audio oscillators, and microphones, and sensors of various kinds, and how to get rid of the noise, and how to analyze the signal. And then at the end, they each give a talk, and that's it.

And I sent out a questionnaire in '85 to about 1,000 alumni of Project Lab, and I was gratified to see how positive it was. And I did Project Lab in China, and in a small black college in Mississippi, and in every case, it was very resonant. Why? Because the teacher was paying attention not to one student, which is a little too much like psychiatry, but to two students, who then argue, and I then listen. Oh, well, that's very interesting.

INTERVIEWER: That 1985 survey-- many of the respondents rated it their, quote, "best MIT experience," end quote.

And then Corridor Lab was kind of a lab on demand.

KING: Right, exactly. And before you, the experiments that you see now in the Edgerton Center, there were about ten boxes on the third floor, and people could do the experiment any time. But what happened is, they were to write it up, and it would be due on Friday. So everybody would be crowding around. There'd be no room. And then secondly, they weren't very well-engineered, and so they had to be kept being fixed.

And there's something I should mention about Project Lab. It succeeded because it was supervised by a technical instructor, now deceased, named Jan Orsula. And without him, it wouldn't really have worked. Just as the molecular beam lab wouldn't have worked without a man, a machinist who became far more sophisticated than any machinist, named Frank O'Brien. So those two people were central.

INTERVIEWER: It's great that you credited both of them.

Can you talk a bit about Concentrated Study, which went from 1968 all the way through 1985?

KING: Yes. Well again, one of the properties of the present system is that a student goes at 9 o'clock to physics lecture, and then maybe he's off, at 11 he goes to a math lecture, and then there's a humanities lecture, and then there's lunch or I don't know. So each of the teachers sort of thinks of that, his course or her course, as being the central part of the student's life. Whereas what the student has to say-- oh my gosh, I better study; my history exam is tomorrow. Oh, but there's also the chemistry. Ugh!

So if you could devote one month, namely, five days a week for four weeks, to one subject, and not have to balance the others, might not that work better? So I tried it in-- what was it, '68? And I scheduled it for June, after the end of the term.

And I got 20 students, which I figured was the right number for the same reason that-- if you have one student, it's too personal. If you have two students, it's pretty good for a certain way. Three students is bad. Then when you get to five students, there gets to be a natural leader, and that's a different kind of system. And with 10, it's sort of like army platoons. And you can manage 20, because you can pair them.

So I would get 20 students, and the first meeting would be around a big table in the room, and I'm sitting at the head, and there's a blackboard. And they're all silent. I'm the authority figure.

But that actually, I'm sorry, isn't the first thing that happens. At 9 o'clock in the morning, they show up. And here's a room with 10 cathode ray oscilloscopes of the old kind, analog. All the knobs are turned fully counterclockwise.

First exercise, find the spot. So they-- oh, that says on-off.  That must-- ah, goodness. And then suddenly it's very bright in the corner. Oh, up-down, left-right. And then they find the spot-- focus, intensity. And then you say, now wiggle it up and down. One of you take the X-thing and go sliding along, and the other one wiggles-- and they see, they've got a plot of the motion.

And the next thing you do is you connect up a dry cell through a reversing switch, double-pull, double-throw, and you make them solder it. So-- oh, a soldering iron? Never heard of it. You have a little section on how to solder. They solder the wires. And now you say, flick the switch! And instead of you turning the left-right knob, it does it automatically.

And so then-- flick a switch! And now they've got a kind of square wave. And they love to see how fast they can do it, and some kids get up to about 20 Hertz. Pretty impressive. And so now they know what this instrument does, and so then they do further experiments with Lissajou figures and talking into a microphone, and that goes on for the first two weeks-- learning about instrumentation.

In the second two weeks, they do an elementary project. And that's from 9 am till 10:30 am. At 10:30 am we stop, and we gave them coffee the first day, and I learned nobody drank coffee, so I got Pepsi or something, and that worked, for 15 minutes.

And then we go into the big lecture hall. I sit there. I'm the authority figure. At noon there's lunch. They go off. Later I met them in Walker Memorial, but not at the beginning. And then, starting at 1 pm, there are one-hour interviews with pairs of students. And the pairs are either self-selected, or we tried to do some matching of interests.

Anyway, so I'm sitting here, and they're on each side of me. They have an open notebook, squared paper. I say, what's your name? You're from International Falls? Oh, very cold in winter, hm.

So I say, how was last night's homework? Well, somebody says, I couldn't do problem three. The other says, oh, well, I had an idea.

Before you know it, they're talking. And then we get onto the subjects-- oh, what's your goal in life? What interests you? What do you want to do as well as homework problems? So I get to know them, and I do pair after pair until 6 o'clock. And then in two days, I've talked to all of them-- all pairs.

And now the conversation is much livelier around the table. And then something comes up. You see, I'm not prepared. When you lecture, you prepare the lecture. I, instead, am just there. And so they say, well, in problem three, I didn't really understand such-and-such. And you said, you know, I thought about that, and I've forgotten. I'm not sure I know the answer.

And the next day, I say, your question-- there are two ways of looking at it. So it's not as though the whole subject was interrupted by chemistry, history, and so on.

INTERVIEWER: It sounds intriguing, and it obviously was successful, because it lasted for 17 years.

KING: It was highly intermittent, and it was also largely taught by me. I couldn't get any other faculty members to do it.

INTERVIEWER: But that's my question. Freshman participation in your course required some kind of collaboration, because they still had other requirements.

KING: Yeah, but first you took June, when they didn't have other requirements, and then independent January came along, and I would do it in January. And I also did sophomore courses-- more advanced.

INTERVIEWER: And that was for, obviously, students who had declared physics as a major.

KING: Yes. Oh and by the way, a very nice paper was issued by a man who observed this course, and he discovered that a few students would say, well, he didn't cover all the material. But most of them said, it was great to be paid attention to, to ask questions. And they invented clever projects-- oh, I loved it. And as I said, I've done it in various other places, in foreign, countries where in China, it really blew their minds. Because there it's very rigid.

INTERVIEWER: And did you do that while concurrent to your time at MIT? Would you do that on sabbatical?

KING: No. I would be in China for a couple of weeks, and part of it would be the April vacation, and I'd get somebody to take my classes for one week.

INTERVIEWER: So we're talking about innovations that you introduced into the teaching of physics. Could you talk a little bit about X courses?

KING: Yes. They started in '88, in the summer, with a program for minority students who were coming to MIT, and who had generally very little experimental experience in their courses. And I was helped immensely by Phylis Morrison, who then had time to work, having to stopped the large project that she and Phil had done. And what it was, was handing out tools and equipment and parts to assemble your own experiment in your dormitory room, and get data, and then write a little report on it.

And then that turned into a formal course in electricity and magnetism, which started off with a student building a low-voltage power supplies that put out 1 to 12 volts, adjustable, quite stable. And then a high-voltage power supply that put out a couple of hundred volts to 1,200 at such low current that if you grabbed it forcefully, you felt nothing, but if you let your finger produce an arc, it would burn your finger, which naturally you would feel. And so they learned about it, and then we talked at great length about the insulating properties of the body and how not to get shocks.

Then they eventually used that high-voltage power supply to make a little spark between two thumbtacks held in a clothespin-- adjustable, therefore-- as little antenna, and they were generating microwaves. The antenna was similar to pick them up. You could show it was polarized.

You could show that it was polarized. You can show that it fell off with distance. You could put a reflector and have-- so the course went quite a long way, and the lectures-- it was half an hour in lecture every week, explaining the experiment. The experiments were written up.

I taught it for three or four or five years, and then when it was handed over to other colleagues, their tendency was to say, I didn't have courses like this. What's all this crap? And so they ignored it. And plus it cost extra money, and wasn't-- well-- so it vanished.

INTERVIEWER: So the student would attend a lecture, and then they would actually go back to their dorm room to work on the experiment, and they'd be building the experiment.

KING: That's right, exactly. And oftentimes, they lived in the same dorm, but sometimes they'd have to go from here to there.

INTERVIEWER: They work in pairs?

KING: In pairs, yes. And there were some problems occasionally with fraternities, but there would always be pairs from a fraternity. I never had much trouble with that.

INTERVIEWER: Were these mainly for physics majors?

KING: No. This was a regular course open to anybody. And some people were concerned that it might be perceived as quote, easier, unquote to get a good grade, but it really wasn't.

INTERVIEWER: So you continue to advocate for the importance of experimental science in education. What is the role of hands-on experimentation today, and what are the opportunities around developing effective experiments for online interaction?

KING: Well, several things. First of all, I can say that the only lab the physics department runs now is our junior lab, which is full of ready-made experiments. I don't know that there's anything that the student assembles or works on himself or herself. And that's it.

And now the students are more handicapped than ever in the sense that they're accustomed to keyboards and screens. And those are wonderful. I'm not knocking it. And they're about 20 times faster at it than I am. I'm very slow. And it's full of information and so on. But the difference between having something about the inverse square law presented either as a movie and measuring it yourself-- there is a difference.

INTERVIEWER: And there's nothing more physical than shocking yourself.

KING: Exactly. Or pounding your finger with a hammer. A blue fingernail. Happens.

And that's vanished. And the thing is, it shouldn't be done at MIT. I have a 12-point program that I would like to see happen which starts with every newborn child in the country gets a set of toys that have a certain educational aspect to them. And that means that except for the tragically disadvantaged, of which there are about 10 percent, and the top group-- a where a group that says, I didn't have this, and throw it out. And then there's a neurotic group that says, if my baby's going to get into Harvard, I'm really going to force this on him. That's a little extreme.

But in general, people have a common experience. And I could give examples.

And then there's a later set of toys that have a toy gyroscope, and a kaleidoscope, and magnets.

INTERVIEWER: Have you thought through-- I know that that's what you've been working on recently.

KING: Yes, I've written it up, but I haven't published it or anything. And again, if I were more aggressive, I would find-- Bill Gates could give me few hundred thousand, and I could start it.

INTERVIEWER: We're going to shift gears here for a bit, but maybe we're going to come back to that.

While you are perhaps best known for your innovation in physics education, you are also an accomplished experimental physicist. You directed MIT's molecular beam laboratory for almost 50 years, and also served as the associate director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Can you talk a bit about your work on null experiments, and how you came to invent the molecular microscope?

KING: Well, the null experiments came largely because they would be an interesting avenue that would connect with some theoretical speculations then current, and would establish a new way of looking at things. And you can sort of say, the immensely expensive experiment at CERN to look for the Higgs Boson, which they think they're almost going to find, and that will have a significant effect on looking at the standard model, and how particles have mass, and so on. But it might not appear, in which case it's an immensely expensive null experiment. You see what I mean? And maybe the universe isn't that way.