The Importance of Fixing

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a narrative by a research student, Jim Williams, at MIT about his experience of fixing laboratory equipment that developed faults. Eminent physicist, Jerrold R. Zacharias, rejected Jim's equipment repair and calibration budget, and asked him to fix the equipment on his own. The first thing that developed fault was a high sensitivity, a differential ‘scope plug-in,’ a Tektronix 1A7. The problem was not particularly difficult to find once he took the time to understand how the thing worked. Hours after the thing was fixed, he continued to probe and puzzle through its subtleties. Jim started enjoying equipment repair so much that he found himself continually drifting away from his research project, taking apart test equipment to see how it worked. He started offering free repair services to other students, who would bring him instruments to fix. He paid people to deliberately disable his test equipment so that he could fix it. Whether the instrument is three months or 30 years old has no beating on the quality of the thinking that went into it.