Education: Razors at the Frontier

The materials were certainly simple enough—a piece of baling wire, a razor blade, some copper foil. But, explained a distinguished M.I.T. physicist one day last week, they were just about all that any schoolboy would need to build himself a device that could measure the amount of silver deposited in electroplating. In another room in M.I.T.'s sprawling Building 2, a colleague toyed with a tray of marbles to demonstrate molecular action. Near by, another scientist was making a telescope out of cheap lenses, curtain rings, a cardboard cylinder, and some pieces of hose...

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