Open course ware

The question of how far we can go when we enhance, or adjust, or touch up an image in science is a critical one. You are all familiar, I'm sure, with the stunningly beautiful Hubble images published all over the world. But most of the world is not familiar with the fact that the colors we're seeing were artificially created, decided and implemented by humans. You can read a conversation I had with some of these researchers in American Scientist, in the resource section, look for this thumbnail. I think you'll find the article interesting, about the decisions the researchers made about coloring the detail of nebula. So in essence, the coloring, or enhancement, was mostly done for the purpose of communicating structure, and I would say also for helping bring attention to these amazing images. Now remember, these pictures of the universe, are representations, that is re- presentations, they are photographs of that universe, they are not the universe. All the phot...

So, one question to ask ourselves is, what is engineering? How do we define, what is engineering? Well, the definition I like to use is one put forth by Steve Senturia, one of our professors who is now retired. He defined engineering to be the purposeful use of science. All right, so what is 6.002 about? So, 6.002 is a first course in engineering. And I like to view 6.002 as the gainful employment of Maxwell's equations. Many of you have seen Maxwell's equations before. Most of you should have. And they are hard stuff. 6.002 is all about teaching you how to simplify our lives, make things simple. So, if you can gainfully employ Maxwell's equations, gainfully employ the facts of nature to build very interesting systems. So let me show you how the transition is made. So, there's a world around us, nature, so we made some observations in nature. We make measurements, and we can write down large tables of measurements. So, for example, we can take objects and ...

An interesting question for computer architects is what capabilities must be included in the ISA? When we studied Boolean gates in Part 1 of the course, we were able to prove that NAND gates were universal, i.e., that we could implement any Boolean function using only circuits constructed from NAND gates. We can ask the corresponding question of our ISA: is it universal, i.e., can it be used to perform any computation? What problems can we solve with a von Neumann computer? Can the Beta solve any problem FSMs can solve? Are there problems FSMs can't solve? If so, can the Beta solve those problems? Do the answers to these questions depend on the particular ISA? To provide some answers, we need a mathematical model of computation. Reasoning about the model, we should be able to prove what can be computed and what can't. And hopefully we can ensure that the Beta ISA has the functionality needed to perform any computation. The roots of computer science stem from the e...